Welcome to photographer Graeme Vaughen‘s newest exploration through a city. Exploration is important in any creative craftwork, especially and almost exclusively importantly in photography. Here at World Famous Design Junkies we LOVE explorations of cities, and G.H. here has his own manifesto about it. “Urban Notebooks” he calls it, his method for mayhem being seeing where people walk through cities he’s never been to, then going everywhere they don’t.

The places where people aren’t, that’s where we’re going here in Warsaw.

urban notebooks

theorists like michel de certeau and henri lefebvre tell us that we can find meaning in cities through everyday practices. that people, in the course and movement of their everyday lives, define the spaces that they use and inhabit. this work pursues the meaning of urban place created through these prosaic spatial practices.

without reference to maps or books, people in cities become my guides to unfamiliar places. the work is made by following strangers as they go about their everyday lives. no-one is followed for long, not long enough for me to become concerned with them as an individual. the tension between individuality and the collective is an intrinsic aspect of the experience of modern cities. in this instance people act as a collective set of city dwellers who define their city and show it to me.

during my stay in these cities, each day was a different journey. the route and direction of each journey being dependent on the movement of the people i followed.

cities have been walked through for many years, there is a long tradition of exporation through urban wandering which includes the parisian flâneur of walter benjamin, the situationists’ dèrive and more recently, the psycho-geographic london journeys of iain sinclair.

in this work we are taken away from usual tourist routes and sites, we are led off the surface of visitors maps and guides to official histories. in this modern spectacle of the city, these notebooks are a product of observations.

Enjoy the barren wasteland! And be sure to visit G.H.’s website for updates, even though we’ll probably be posting those here too!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies environment category.