ABOUT DRIFTWORK
Drift conjures many things: a splintered log on a shoreline, stray smoke, a daydream, a river crossing, a continent, a wanderer (voluntary or not, perhaps with a beard). These photographic galleries take inspiration from a long and unruly lineage of walkers who found, in the simple act of drifting through urban landscapes, a way of seeing the world.
The idea of drifting in order to see - think of it as looking slowly - has a long genealogy. One version begins 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. Some found danger; some found spectres above; others traced ruins beneath their feet. All found the 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. Their task was to notice, as a stranger might, what slipped past everyone else. They became experts in getting lost and tracing the footfalls of others, but were easily caricatured and too often disappeared into fog and nostalgia.
In the mid-twentieth century, the Lettrist International and later the Situationists, 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 banality. It was intended as a political gesture, but was also an excellent excuse to walk around with curiosity switched on.
The word Driftwork comes from this 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 where they pleased. 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 is required: only a willingness to wander and an alertness to the fact that things rarely line up neatly. Novelists, poets and lyricists have carried this instinct forward, even as our world became shaped by road planners and mall developers.
The term also makes a useful lodestar for photographers. Street photography has long pursued the visual accident: the unexpected alignment, transient gesture or brief incongruity that exists only because someone happened to be looking. That history deserves an essay of its own. For now, I simply acknowledge the genealogy.
These photographs are a modest contribution to that spirit of wandering with a camera: not hunting masterpieces or arranging grand poses, but drifting attentively to see what the world offers when it is not trying.
I hope you enjoy them; and if not, one may, of course, simply drift on.
* A coney-catcher was a confidence trickster or street swindler.