The Man With the Hat

"Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, whosays this, saying it's me?" - Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

Buster Keaton in Samuel Beckett's "Film"

Heiner Goebbels

Josef Sudek

André Kertész

"As I wander home along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute." — Vladimir Nabokov, A Letter That Never Reached Russia

Brassaï

Bill Brandt

André Kertész

Karl Grune

Fritz Lang 

In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say “Let’s get a rough idea”, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture, 1933

Carol Reed

Josef Koudelka

"The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice." — Albert Camus, The Plague

Bowler Man in the Mirror  

Greg Costanzo

Bill Brandt, René Magritte

Roswell Angier

"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… The flâneur is not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, the neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer 'apprehends,' as a detective apprehends a criminal." - Susan Sontag, from On Photography, 1973

Eve Arnold

Tom Waits

Rodney Smith

Alain Resnais

Charles Baudelaire, Voyage

It's bitter knowledge that one learns from travel. 

The world so small and drab, from day to day, 

The horror of our image will unravel, 

A pool of dread in deserts of dismay.

Must we depart, or stay? Stay if you can.

Go if you must. One runs: another hides

To baffle Time, that fatal foe to man.

And there are runners, whom no rest betides.

Carol Reed

August Sander

August Sander

Robert Frank

Wall Street Man

Wolf Suschitzky

Wolf Suschitzky

Louis Stettner

Steve Schapiro

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within…By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere." — Paul Auster, City of Glass

Wolf Suschitzky

Berenice Abbott

Walter Sanders

Larry Silver

Larry Silver

Rodney Smith

Robert Frank

Ted Croner  

Louis Stettner

Antonín Kratochvíl

George Krause

Béla Tarr

Carl Mydans

Louis Stettner

Rodolphe Archibald Reiss

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds." - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3

Buster Keaton

Fritz Lang

Peter Lorre

Fritz Lang

The Invisible Man

Le Samourai

A Clockwork Orange

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence."

Dead Man Walking

Marylin Manson

Dorothea Lange

Mona tried to tell me

To stay away from the train line

She said that all the railroad men

Just drink up your blood like wine

And I said "Oh I didn't know that

But then again there's only one I've met

And he just smoked my eyelids

And punched my cigarette"

Bob Dylan

Ikko Narahara

"One would have to be like a taxi, a waiting line, a line of flight, a bottleneck, a traffic jam, green and red lights, slight paranoia, difficult relations with the police. Being an abstract and broken line, a zigzag, that slips 'between'". - Deleuze/Parnet, Dialogues

Hiromu Kira

Jack Spencer

Jack Spencer

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

Look into the sky. Is there no constellation Rider?
Within us dwells, oddly engrained, a pride of place
concerning earth. Observe a second figure,
who rides, directs and reins its trace.

Are not we, in our essential sinew,
required to tack, track, trot and stay?
Yet, by one deft touch, permitted to view,
in twin cognition, new horizons along the way?

But are they twain? Do not both denote
the nature of their common trail,
though one eat bread, the other oat?

Should the starry union prove otherwise
let us yet conspire, in joy, to hail
the apparent oneness. Let it suffice.

Rodney Smith


Some photos and quotes thanks to Liquidnight