ABOUT DRIFTWORK
A Short Reflection on Walking and Photographs
Drift can conjure many thoughts: a rotten log on a shoreline, stray smoke, a daydream, a river crossing, a continent, a wanderer (voluntary or not, perhaps with a beard). Looking back over twenty-five years, it also captures something of the way my interests in walking and photography became entwined. The galleries presented here are a record of snatched moments during many erratic journeys, mostly in Asia and Africa, and usually undertaken for some other purpose entirely. The time has come to give the better shots a digital home, and to discover what patterns have been forming among them.
I have always found it easier to understand a place by moving slowly through it. Walking allows the attention to settle on unimportant, unannounced, awkward things, what familiarity renders invisible; a camera gives the attention somewhere to go. I didn't always know it, but this habit belongs to a long lineage of walkers who found, in the simple act of drifting through urban landscapes, ways of seeing the world. The idea of drifting in order to see - think of it as looking slowly - began a long time ago, perhaps with ancient traditions of itinerancy. My version puts it in the eighteenth century, as the modern city emerged and streetwise coney-catchers,* self-conscious Spectators and other idling gawkers discovered that wandering without obvious purpose could sharpen the powers of observation. They treated the streets as something readable: imagine a library of shifting faces and postures, walls and alleys, each with its own atmosphere. In those old days, some found danger; some found specters above; others traced ruins beneath their feet. All found a kind of theatre of the unplanned.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the flâneur, the untranslatable figure perhaps only of writers' imaginations, had refined the pastime into a more deliberate form of street detection. If they existed, flâneurs moved through crowds with studied slowness, half within the city’s multitudes and half apart, present but out of step. They became experts in getting lost while following others' trails, but were easily caricatured and too often themselves disappeared into fog and nostalgia.
In the mid-twentieth century, the Situationists and later the Letterist International, loose collectives of bar-room philosophers and “architects of laziness,” gave this wandering a name and made it more political, more direct. Guy Debord, working with the idea of “psychogeography,” a term reportedly suggested by an Algerian exile during a heavy evening of kif-smoking. coined La Dérive: the deliberate practice of drifting through streetscapes, following the moods and textures of cities rather than errands, efficiency and the other ushers of bottom-line banality. It was intended as a political gesture but was also an excellent excuse to abandon the approved route and permit the insignificant details to occupy more attention than they were and are usually allotted.
The word Driftwork comes from that now rather lost moment and is borrowed from the English title of a collection of Jean-François Lyotard’s essays from the late 1960s. Written as old dogmas unravelled, at a moment his translator described as one “when imperial reason came to an end,” the essays allowed Lyotard’s guerrilla thoughts to wander at will. Driftwork became a literary effort to resist settled language and follow fragmented images as they meet, collide or fall apart, without forcing them into tidy narratives. No grand theory required: only a willingness to wander down avenues, if not rabbit holes, and an alertness to the fact that things rarely line up neatly. Novelists, poets and lyricists of our postcolonial times have carried this second sense forward, even as our world became shaped by road planners and mall developers in their enthusiasm for orderly circulation.
The term also makes a useful lodestar for photographers. Street photography has of course long pursued the visual accident: the unexpected alignment, the transient gestures and brief incongruities that exist only because someone happened to be looking. Such history deserves an essay of its own. For now, I simply acknowledge the genealogy. The photographs here are a modest contribution to that spirit of wandering with a camera: not hunting masterpieces or arranging grand poses, but drifting attentively to find the detail that does not belong, the pattern in the disorder, the fleeting human arrangements that will never recur precisely.
I hope you find something of interest in them, and I'll add more from time to time.
* A coney-catcher was a confidence trickster or street swindler.