Creative Writing

Being a flaneur did not seem like a task, because I, and I guess everyone, is used to observing or more likely judging people. The task for me at leas was observing people with camera. It strange when I hold a camera pointing at someone’s face I feel like I am insulting or abusing someone, it could have something to do the negativity surrounding media and CCTV. Also due to government and news abusing peoples privacy I feel like a guy holding a camera is the equivalent to psychopathic dictator. As a result of this my first videos were all of peoples back as I discovered people cannot see you when you are behind them, which I found pretty beneficial when filming. Although, as the day progressed I became more and more confident to abuse peoples privacy that I had valued at the beginning of the day. As I said to myself how much can you care about people taking photos or videos of you, when there are literally thousands of people looking at you as you are. And at least the camera doesn't judge you.

But as I began to be more liberal with filming people, they seemed to be becoming a lot more camera shy with people completely changing the path they were walking to get out of view of the camera. I can only presume they had been warned my local authorities that my camera was some kind of heavily artillery, and so I became more cautious to get shots of people.

Something I found in the experience was the most interesting people, moment and events happened when the camera was not on. I could speak very wisely and use this as a metaphor to how in modern times people forget to experience things and prefer to hide their phones. Taking photos to justify a moment instead of living it … but I’m not going to do that.

Talking of interesting things specifically people, I found the older a person was the more interesting I found them to be especially when it came to photography. Children are an exception to this though as they normally very emotional even about the smallest things. Teenagers myself included are not interesting to photograph it may be all teenagers or just this generation, but they are so incredibly null of any interesting or redeeming qualities too make them fun to photograph. I think the only people I filmed in my video that are not over thirty was because they walked past someone I was filming who was more interesting from them.

To conclude my time being a flaneur I would like to say that it was a experience that I will probably soon forget, although it was fun I was not amazed by anything I saw or discovered. Observing people is something that I think I naturally do, but maybe something I will take from the task is the confidence to photograph film and draw people in world, as no one seemed to mind. I very much enjoyed the task and one thing I will take from the experience will be that I will try not to live life  through a camera as the most important moments happen when your not looking through a lens.