Illumination #2 - Part 2 in progress, The Middle East and the female flaneur

After having researched topics relating to the art of walking/flaneur-ism, orientalism, and observance as a street photographer, there is much to ponder. To begin with lets start with what exactly is a Flaneur. According to Wikipedia:

“The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun un flâneur [ahn flah-NUR]—which has the basic meanings of ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, ‘saunterer’, ‘loafer’—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. Because of the term’s usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.”

Putting aside the maleness of the definition for now, the relationship between being a Flaneur and street photography is something to also note:

The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque."

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, (Wikipedia)

The Urban megacities of  the "Middle East" (Cairo, Istanbul as the largest and most notable) are not exactly always easy places to walk. Istanbul may be picturesque but it is often unbearably crowded, humid, and difficult to navigate enjoyably especially on a weekend. Cairo is an absolute maelstrom of chaos and most areas don't even have sidewalks. Walking in Cairo, especially downtown is an almost masochistic act involving dodging completely lawless traffic, motorbikes, donkeys, carts and a variety of human interactions including constant street sellers, street animals, dust and debri. Walking in Cairo as a woman adds a new level of awareness and defensiveness to an already challenging task. The amount of catcalling and harassment as well as just benignly aggressive stares has been well documented and discussed by numerous people. I myself noticed that the way in which I wandered and explored drastically changed after a year spent there - I now intuitively always walk in the road and always alert and somewhat on the defensive. These are not the paradise-like halcyon streets of Paris that the originally Flaneurs inhabited.

In"On Photography" Sontag argues:

"That the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish within people a "chronic voyeuristic relation"^[1] to the world around them. Among the consequences of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled and made equal. This idea did not originate with Sontag, who often synthesized European cultural thinkers with her particular eye toward the United States.

As she argues, perhaps originally with regard to photography, the medium fostered an attitude of anti-intervention. Sontag says that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other. In this context, she discusses in some depth the relationship of photography to politics.

This paragraph really resonated with me, the concept that a street photographer mustn't intervene with their subject. Orientalism by its nature aims to present a distorted view of the otherness of the Middle East, yet street photography isn't exactly curated - selectively chosen perhaps but it has a certain measure of authenticity (compared to painting for example) particularly withing large urban areas. I have been recently interested in playing with that concept by staging interventions or situations, specifically within the extremely gendered spaces of Istanbul (male only cafes, certain areas and markets for example) and how might I reclaim, as a female, my right to that public space, even as an observer who doesn't want to exactly distort that 'authenticity'.

I found this paragraph in a 2016 article by the Guardians Lauren Elkin, "A tribute to female flaneurs : The women who reclaimed our city streets" that got me to think about my own practice of wandering the city:  ( https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/29/female-flaneur-women-reclaim-streets )

'Rather than wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the female flâneur has an element of transgression: she goes where she’s not supposed to. Take the French artist Sophie Calle, whose celebrated career began the day that, out of boredom, she began secretly following people in the street whom she had chosen arbitrarily. One evening, at a gallery opening, she encountered a man she had been trailing earlier that afternoon. The coincidence seemed like a sign. When he mentioned he was travelling to Venice the next day, she decided to follow him there covertly, too, and she pursued him all over town until he recognised her under her blonde wig. Compiling her notes and photographs, she turned them into an installation and a book, called Suite Vénitienne. Sophie Calle, as flâneuse, claimed her right to walk in the city – not merely following her man, but stalking her prey'

While I have not been as methodical about my wanderings as Sophie Galle, and havent focused specifically on one individual, I do tend to border on the obsessive about my observing and must regularly make my pilgrimages to various places within Istanbul. I have long referred to my walks as "walking meditations" because while I am paradoxically surrounded by noise and chatter, I often tend to do my best creative imaginings amidst such chaos.

Sophie Calle - Suite Venitienne

In trying to make connections between my own practice as a Flaneur, and my own possible Orientalism or at least interest in the history of it, I found this text from Ali Behdads book, "Belated travellers: Orientalism in the age of Colonial Dissolution". Speaking of the French poet Gustave Flaubert, (who travelled to Egypt in 1849), definitely triggered something in me and made me think that indeed I must be at least on some level, an Orientalist:

"Like Nerval, Flaubert expected the Orient to be the scene of the otherness he had dreamed in his childhood; he wanted to find himself in an unknown neighbourhood, a place where he could get lost, come to dead ends and feel displaced. Flaubert did not look for Orientalist connaissance , he went after Orientalist meconnaissance"

Connaissance can be described as reality and meconnaissance as misrepresented reality or false recognition. In this case by wandering as a Flaneur and feeling a sense of recognition or pleasant displacement in the megacities of Cairo and Istanbul, it could be suggested I am feeling a false sense of home within that otherness, that search for the unknown. My question now is: How much do I view myself as apart from that otherness, though fascinated by it (as Flaubert and others did) and how much do I view myself, as a general black sheep and alienated person, a part of that otherness?  Whereas Orientalists in the past created an identity for themselves based upon their separation from that otherness, and a fetishization of it, I feel a sense of home somehow within it. The line between East and West, the 'other' is blurred. As a female, as a person who spent a large portion of life alienated from the mainstream and between cultures, I perhaps only feel at home when I am not expected to fit in, on the edges, in these liminal inbetween spaces.