The author is a Chinese national who studied in Toronto, Canada. His objective with his project was to evoke his experience of loneliness by photography. He did so through an exhibition composed of three parts:
- Overlapped photographs of his place of residence and photographs of landscapes in the city that evoke feelings of loneliness in him. He used a trace paper strategy to overlap these photographs. The idea was to show how loneliness is both felt within and outdoors.
- An image of his phone’s photo album, which was a demonstration of his habit of checking past photos when he is sad.
- A book which is an archive or diary of his experiences while walking in Toronto.
This work was the first to show me how to structure a work of art inspired by research. He explicitly articulates the theories and subjects that inform his work as well as specific artists that influence his approach and methods.
Among the subjects that inform his project are:
- loneliness
- psychogeography
- flaneur
- This work showed me how the idea of the flaneur has been picked up by contemporary photographers. In fact, there is a term for them: “armed flaneurs.”
- non-place
Among his influences are:
Unsorted
Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City Sophie Calle Paolo Emanuele Barreta (contemporary photographer) Edward Hopper (American Realism painter) Wolfgang Tillmans
Marc Auge, non-place Jessie Martin
- Deconstructing Understandings of Emptiness: An Examination of Representations of Transitory Space and ‘Non-place’ in Photography
- Night Moves
- https://www.jessiebiancamartin.com/
Catherine Chan, “Effects of Internet on the Concept of Street Photographer as Flâneur: Interaction between Virtual Spaces and Physical Cityscape”
Kirsten Seale, Eye-Swiping London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur (Literary London Journal), http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2005/seale.html.
Rosa Saverino, “Word and Image Relations in The Autobiographical Narratives of Roland Barthes and Sophie Calle” (Thesis, 2013), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/68962.
References
Wang, Yitong. A Psychogeographical Approach to Photographing Loneliness in the Urban Environment. 2024. OCAD University, masters. openresearch.ocadu.ca, https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/4398/.