Flâneur at Work, the name of this site and of the diary, starts from an old word. In nineteenth-century Paris, while the old quarters were giving way to the new boulevards, a flâneur was someone who walked the city with no errand, for the pleasure of watching it. The figure took on its lasting meaning with Charles Baudelaire, in an essay he wrote about the illustrator Constantin Guys. For Baudelaire the flâneur lives in the crowd the way a fish lives in water.¹

Photography picked up this way of looking as soon as cameras were small enough to carry around all day. Susan Sontag, in her essays On Photography, describes the photographer as “an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno”.² It is the tradition this diary comes from, and one I have also studied as a piece of personal research, reading about the flâneur and about street photography to understand what I was doing when I went out with a camera. The writers quoted on this page come from that reading.

People tend to picture the flâneur as an idler, but Baudelaire describes something closer to an artist at work: a passionate observer who looks at the city with the fresh eyes of a convalescent.³ That is what the “at work” in the name stands for, along with a nod to the roadworks warning sign, the triangle with a man at work on it. The street photographer Matt Stuart says it more plainly: “being out ‘doing nothing’ can be a very active time”.⁴

the mark, and the road sign it comes from

Looking back over ten years of walking with a camera, the first several went into chasing someone else’s idea of a good picture. Street photography has its own competitions and festivals, and they tend to reward a particular kind of image: layers of people stacked in depth, light falling on exactly the right face, everything caught at the instant Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment. Some of mine did well, and I’m still glad they did.

Then I realised that, back home, I was choosing the pictures a jury would probably choose, and passing over the ones I actually cared about. Reading the history of street photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz helped me see it differently. At one point they note that Cartier-Bresson’s own book was called, in French, Images à la sauvette, closer to pictures snatched on the run, and they argue that the moment most typical of street photography “is the indecisive moment”,⁸ when nothing has been settled yet. That is the moment I wait for now.

In practice it’s usually something slightly off: a gesture that doesn’t belong to the place where it happens, an advert that seems to answer the street below it, an ordinary afternoon that turns strange for a second. Stuart draws the line clearly. A street photographer, he writes, is “not a reporter”, and works in a “slightly grey area of showing reality, but using ambiguity and surrealism”.⁹ That grey area is where I feel most at home.

The equipment is simple on purpose. Small digital compacts let me pass almost unnoticed, usually with a filter in front of the lens that softens the image a little. The flash works the other way: when I use it, and I don’t always, I’m choosing to be seen.

Most of what I know I learned by walking, and some of it from two photographers I studied with. Francesco Cito, a Neapolitan photojournalist with two World Press Photo awards, held the workshop I attended in Naples in 2019. Matt Stuart, whose book I’ve quoted above, taught the one I took in Rome in 2023. From him I kept a piece of advice, “think fast, move slow”,¹⁰ and a rule I try to follow: “If it’s not in the subject’s best interests, walk on.”¹¹

Some of the work has travelled. Martin Parr picked one of my pictures for a Life Framer open call in 2018, and Steve McCurry, judging the Exibart Street Contest 2021, put one of my series in the top ten. In December 2019 a print hung at HistoryMiami Museum during the Art Basel Week, and in 2023 I co-authored “10 Street Photography” with photographers whose work I had been following for years.

awards, exhibitions and press

All of this is also why the work usually sits badly in commercial photography, where a brand tends to want the product clear and the person flattered. It works better wherever someone wants a point of view: a magazine story, a book, an exhibition, a project about a city or one of its neighbourhoods.

What I can bring is time. I walk the same streets for hours, at the pace these pictures need, and I edit what I bring back as strictly as I do for this diary.