During the first half of 2024, we held the Flaneur Artists’ Residency with the participation of five photographers. The Van Leer Institute graciously hosted us for workshops, tours, and lectures on street photography in general and the city of Jerusalem in particular. Each photographer produced a body of work referring to an area of interest with the desire to explore it.
This project envisions a multi-year program bringing to Jerusalem the very best photographers who documented the city, concluding with the creation of a broad, comprehensive visual archive enabling a contemporary view of Jerusalem as seen by contemporary artists whose oeuvre focuses on the city.
This is the first of a two-part exhibition of works from the participants’ extensive works.
The participating photographers sought to map Jerusalem while learning from it. Some describe the city from a researcher’s point of view, while others facilitate a reimagining of it. Strolling facilitates contemplation of the human condition of the city through tiny details that seem to be a collection of constantly changing items that never reach final form. It is impossible to draw conclusions about the overall state of Jerusalem from observing the details, since they are only fragments from the continuous transformation comprising the city. These fragments cannot reflect the locale or characterize it.
The photographers did not behave like tourists enchanted by the city’s wonders: they strolled around without a destination and without a guide. They became sculptors, painters, writers, or historians, determining their pathway intuitively, without a specific goal. In contrast to the tourist setting out for a destination, the flâneur is led by the streets more than merely walking through them. Thus the sites photographed in the project are neither tourist attractions nor heritage sites; the photographs were taken, on the margins, in neglected, forgotten corners, invisible, underneath the surface.
These photographs may be said to be “undomesticated”: they are urban, but not regimented by the city. The works originated in a concrete place but refuse to describe it: they resulted from walking around without leaving traces. These are rebellious photographs that refrain from speaking in the spirit of the times, neither as image nor as object. They embody an anachronistic element, since the flâneur strolling through the city does not wish to be up to date according to current trends, but makes sure to remain on the margins as much as possible.
