Photography and Walking

A stranger turns a corner. You follow.

In 1969, Vito Acconci created Following Piece, a work in which he selected strangers at random on the streets of New York and followed them until they disappeared into a private space. The idea is simple. The questions it raises are anything but.

In this episode of Photography and Walking, we explore how surrendering your own route changes the experience of walking, why Following Piece still feels unsettling today, and how photography became less a finished image than a record of an action. Along the way, we reflect on...

At first glance, almost nothing seems to happen.

Six people stand outside a photography studio in Newark, New Jersey, in 1962. No one looks toward the camera. Everyone is watching something beyond the edge of the frame.

Yet the longer we stay with Lee Friedlander's photograph, the richer it becomes. Repeated gestures, shared gazes, architecture and small visual echoes quietly connect the scene, revealing relationships that are easy to miss at first glance.

In this episode, we explore how Friedlander discovered meaning not by isolating individual subjects, but by noticing how ordinary elements briefly...

A woman moves through Eugène Atget's photograph and becomes a blur.
Everything around her remains sharp: the building, the street lamp, the posters, the cobblestones. Yet the passerby seems to dissolve into the street itself.

In this episode of Photography and Walking, we spend time with Cabaret, Rue Mouffetard, a photograph made in Paris around 1899–1900. Through Atget's patient observation of an ordinary street corner, we explore attention, memory, urban space, and the relationship between walking and photography.

The episode reflects on the street corner as a place of encounter and possibility, considers Wal...

A temporary circle appears on the snowy floor of a forest in Tierra del Fuego. Nearby, traces of footsteps, mud, ash, and weather quietly record the passage of a body moving through the landscape.
In this episode, we explore the work of Richard Long through a series of photographs and texts produced during a six-day winter walk in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in 1997. Moving beyond the idea of walking as journey or endurance, we consider how Long's work focuses on contact: the brief marks left behind when movement meets the ground.
Through circles, boot-heel lines, scattered...

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 a place of attention, memory, and presence. Along the way, we look at Levitt’s remarkable approach to street photography, her observations of everyday life during the Great Depression, and the...

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 movement. Rather than representing the city, it allows the city to leave physical impressions behind through friction, pressure, and continual contact. The walk becomes visible on the surface of the object itself.
The episode...

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 unfolds not only through urban space, but through systems of visibility already shaping how bodies are seen, interpreted, and recognized. Moving between Allen’s early street photograph and her later work with transgender and gender-nonconforming communities, the episode re...

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’s background in painting — including his studies with Fernand Léger in postwar Paris — shaped his approach to photography through form, pressure, and proximity. It also considers how walking operates...

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 the object, opening toward action, duration, and presence. Walking becomes a form in itself, shaped by rhythm, repetition, and the body moving through space without leaving a...

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 Toronto.

In this episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume explores how Michael Snow transformed walking into a conceptual form. While street photographers of the 1960s chased fleeting moments on sidewalks and intersections, Michael Snow constructed a...

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, it left no infrastructure behind — only a fleeting trace that invited attention rather than authority.

In this episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe reflects on fragility as a form of...

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 with panoramic photographs and returning to the region repeatedly over four years, he reveals the wall slowly, as something that stretches beyond the limits of any single frame.
Walking becomes central to the work. The photographs accumulate presence through time, showing how a po...

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 were left by anonymous hands long before the photographer arrived. Under grazing light, the surface begins to resemble a sculptural relief. A face appears, not drawn but emerging from shadow and depth.
From this p...

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 spectacle. She stepped into public space and altered its internal hierarchy — revealing how streets discipline posture, movement, and gendered presence.

Against the backdrop of second-wave feminism and a conservative Viennese urban culture, the work ex...

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 extended periods of time. These maps don’t describe cities as they are planned. They assemble them as they are lived.

Moving between panoramic views and intimate details, Nishin...

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 project, this episode traces how photography can act not as transparent documentation, but as critique — shaped by history, labour, and global systems. Walking becomes method, and sequencing becomes meaning.

This is...

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, Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle, and earlier collective walking experiments, all of which challenge the idea that vision is the default way of knowing a place.

Venice is usually consumed through the tourist gaze — a city s...

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 Water” offers a moment to breathe and reorient before the series continues deeper into Venice.

L’épisode 6 est une pause tranquille entre deux chapitres vénitiens — un court passag...

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 Paul Strand’s hidden lenses to Vito Acconci’s Following Piece. We also touch on a walk of my own, in Sunderland, that echoed her quiet pursuit. Together, these acts remind us that walking with a camera is...

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 : exploratoire, ouvert et attentif au monde qui se déploie.

Related images and references:
photographyandwalking.com

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Music: “Beat ’em with Rhythm” by Victor Natas, edited for this podcast (CC...

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, and how each step a photographer takes shapes what the image can reveal — and what it cannot.

Dans ce premier épisode de Photography and Walking, Philippe réfléchit à une photographie prise par Mary...

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 Likasi, l’artiste congolais Sammy Baloji marche et photographie les rues de sa ville natale, révélant les traces discrètes de l’architecture coloniale et la politi...

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 Sullivan’s quiet act of movement redefined both walking and photography — not as documentation, but as lived, embodied resistance. Through the lens of psychogeography, feminism, and conceptual art, we follow her walk as a r...

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.

En juin 1989, un cachalot flotte au-dessus de Paris. Les appareils cliquent, les grues se lèvent, et le photographe japonais Daidō Moriyama marche dans le quartier des Halles — une ville en mouvement ent...