Photography and Walking

A young boy crouches on a New York sidewalk, drawing with chalk on the pavement. Around him, rough circles and fading lines spread across the concrete. At first glance, the scene appears simple. Yet the longer we remain with Helen Levitt’s photograph, the more the sidewalk itself begins to change. In this episode, we explore how a temporary act of drawing transforms an ordinary urban surface into...

In 1992, Gabriel Orozco rolled a sphere of plasticine through the streets of New York City. As it moved, the surface gathered dust, stones, fragments of metal, cracks, and countless traces left behind by contact with the city itself. The work, titled Yielding Stone , exists somewhere between sculpture, performance, walking, and process. This episode explores how the sphere functions as a record of...

In 1967, Mariette Pathy Allen photographed a woman walking past a storefront mannequin somewhere between New Jersey and Philadelphia. At first, the image appears ordinary: a pedestrian, a display window, the rhythm of the street continuing around them. But slowly, something unstable begins to emerge between the moving figure and the constructed body behind glass. This episode explores how walking...

Episode 16 looks at a photograph made by William Klein during the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City in 1955. Rather than photographing the crowd from a safe or distant position, Klein moves directly into it. Faces press toward the surface of the image, space compresses, and the photograph begins to feel less like observation and more like physical encounter. The episode explores how Klein’...

In 1985, Hamish Fulton walked for eight days in central Saskatchewan, near Ajawaan Lake. The work begins there. This episode stays with a simple shift that takes time to register. The photographs are not the work. They follow it. What we encounter comes after a movement that has already unfolded, step by step, across distance and time. Fulton’s practice emerges at a moment when art moves beyond th...

In 1961, Canadian artist Michael Snow created a simple silhouette of a woman mid-stride. He called it Walking Woman . What followed became one of the most quietly radical gestures in postwar Canadian art. Repeated across paintings, plywood cut-outs, and photographic situations between 1961 and 1967, the figure appears in galleries, on walls, and even among real pedestrians in the streets of Toront...

In 2004, Francis Alÿs carried a leaking can of green paint through Jerusalem, tracing the path of the 1949 armistice line — a border once drawn in pencil on a map, later absorbed into the city’s streets and neighborhoods. The gesture was simple: walk, and let the paint fall. The line appeared, thinned, broke, and disappeared. It depended entirely on duration. Unlike walls or engineered boundaries,...

In this episode of Photography and Walking , Philippe Guillaume explores Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the barrier that separates Israel and Palestine. Photographed between 2008 and 2012, the series traces the wall across hills, orchards, roads, and neighbourhoods. Rather than presenting the structure as a single dramatic event, Koudelka approaches it through repetition and movement. Working wit...

When we think about night photography, Brassaï’s images of Paris often come immediately to mind — cafés, wet streets, and figures moving through pools of light. But in this episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume turns to a different body of work: Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti. The image discussed here, made around 1944–45, shows marks carved into a Paris wall. These gestures we...

In 1968, VALIE EXPORT walked through Vienna with Peter Weibel crawling behind her on a leash. The city did not slow. It continued. This episode explores feminist performance art, public space, and the politics of walking in 1968 Vienna. This episode examines From the Portfolio of Doggedness , a performance that survives through five black-and-white documentary photographs. EXPORT did not stage a s...

Photography is never neutral. Every image comes from a position, a distance, a moment chosen instead of another. Walking works the same way. Each step frames the world, shaping what comes into view and what falls away. In this episode of Photography and Walking, we look at Sohei Nishino’s Diorama Maps — large photographic works assembled from thousands of images gathered while walking cities for e...

What happens when photography refuses neutrality? In this episode of Photography and Walking , we step into the uneasy space between documentary and art through the work of Allan Sekula. Often treated as evidence or record, photographs are rarely neutral. Sekula reminds us that every photograph carries intention, position, and power. Focusing on Walking on Water , part of his larger Fish Story pro...

Recorded on location in Venice, this episode asks a simple but unsettling question: what happens when we walk through one of the most visually saturated cities in the world without seeing? Following earlier reflections on Sophie Calle’s work with following and attention, Blind in Venice turns toward blindness as a way of rethinking perception. The episode moves through Calle’s Les Aveugles , Carme...

Episode 6 is a quiet pause between two Venetian chapters — a short bridge in a city full of them. Here, Philippe reflects on what links photography and walking: attention, drift, surprise, and the rhythm of moving through space. Walking prepares the eye; photography gathers what the body has already sensed. Together, they form a way of noticing that builds slowly, step by step. “A Line Across Wate...

In Suite Vénitienne , artist Sophie Calle followed a man she barely knew through the streets of Venice, photographing and writing as she traced his movements. What begins as curiosity turns into a study of looking itself — where attention, desire, and intrusion blur. This episode of Photography and Walking explores Calle’s project alongside earlier experiments in surveillance and performance, from...

Before we set off, a brief introduction. Philippe Guillaume presents Photography and Walking — a podcast about how walking and photography intertwine — and shares the spirit in which the project began: exploratory, open-ended, and attentive to the world as it unfolds. Une brève introduction à Photography and Walking, où Philippe Guillaume présente l’esprit dans lequel le projet est né : exploratoi...

In June 1989, a whale floats above Paris. Cameras click, cranes lift, and Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama keeps walking through Les Halles — a city in motion between past and future. This episode explores how one surreal sight became a meditation on walking, perception, and photographic truth — reminding us that sometimes what’s worth noticing isn’t on the ground, but drifting just above it....

In 1970, Montreal artist Françoise Sullivan left one museum and walked to another — turning that simple gesture into a work of art. Her route, from the Musée d’art contemporain on Cité du Havre to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Sherbrooke Street, traced more than just distance: it crossed institutions, histories, and power structures. This episode of Photography and Walking explores how Sulli...

In Vues de Likasi , Congolese artist Sammy Baloji walks and photographs the streets of his hometown, revealing the quiet traces of colonial architecture and the politics embedded in everyday space. This episode of Photography and Walking follows his slow, deliberate vision — where each step becomes an act of witnessing, and each frame a way of confronting history street by street. Dans Vues de Lik...

In this first episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe reflects on a photograph taken by Mary Ellen Mark in Bombay’s red-light district in 1978. Through the story of Lata — a young woman lying in a narrow, jade-green room — he considers how walking became Mark’s way of gaining access, trust, and understanding. The episode explores how documentary photography moves between empathy and exposure,...