Tales of a Flaneur's photostream  

Visit my web site, Tales of a Flaneur, to see my current projects and read some of the stories behind my images:

www.flaneurphoto.com

Please contact me on photo@flaneurphoto.com if you would like to use any of my images in commercial advertising or on personal web sites / blogs.

All images copyright 2011 by John Matthews / All rights reserved.

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"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

- Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'

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When I write of the beauty of the world, I mean the beauty of the light as it reveals the world to us. Objects remain as they are moment to moment and would always appear as such if it were not for the perpetual mutability of light. How few people perceive light unless they're blinded by the morning sun. Without strong light, the blur of my uncorrected (or even corrected) vision worsens.

Our individual perceptions of the world fascinates me. I continually question what I percieve and wonder how my brain orders the disjointed information captured by my eyes (and tongue, skin, etc). I blame my myopia for the first stirrings of this obsession. This nearsightedness makes close objects appear 'sharp', but everything beyond blurry. Without something to correct my vision, the world beyond an arm's-length away looks as smeary as a painting by Turner. This defect of sight arises from the same flaw that would produce a blurry photograph - my eye sits too far from my cornea like a lens fixed too far from the film or digital sensor.

My sight went uncorrected for the first seven years of my life. I don't remember the world as an innocent before I learned of my imperfection. I have uncertain memories of squinting to read the chalkboard when I was nine, but I don't recall feeling it was strange at the time. My parents bought me glasses after reports of my facial contortions in the classroom. The world appeared sharper than before and I no longer squinted, but, although I didn't realise it at the time, I still couldn't see the world with the clarity common to other people. I felt increasingly detached from the world as I experienced everything through pieces of glass. The immense size of the cinema screen brought me closer to something acutely real than reality ever did.

A few years later, early teenage vanity led me to try contact lenses. While you might attribute this to raging hormones (and the asthetic qualities of women certainly appealed to me), contact lenses transformed my existence. Little slips of plastic adhered to my eyeballs and I viewed the world as it IS. Nothing warped the edges of my field of view and nothing separated me from the morning mist or the girl with whom I danced.

I don't understand how people in full possession of their sight don't swoon daily from the luscious textures of the world. I have trouble editing everyday experience into manageable chunks, scenes or still pictures. As a newly-sighted boy on my walk home from school up our long driveway, I felt mesmerised by the cascade of green leaves on the trees; I could see each leaf as distinct as well as part of a patterned whole.

The world went from a dull, smudgy place better experienced through the cinema to a wondrous reality of which I felt a part. Still, I find it impossible to cast off that early sense of seperation. I use the lens of my camera and the words on this page to bridge the distance.

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I perform a dramatic monologue based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe, for updates visit www.flaneurphoto.com/poe/

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I live near Hampstead Heath and love to explore this glorious patch of English countryside set beside the Big Smoke.

My passions include cinema, literature, poetry, theatre, politics and I am a bit of a news junkie.

twitter.com/talesofaflaneur

Just after September 11, I made a characteristically glum video in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Enjoy my first effort at flaneurism.