DESMOND PAINTER

Psychogeographers often, and with good reason, critique the car and what it has done to urban space. Many of us experience automotive alienation: the suburban sprawl, the gated community, the traffic jam, the numbing commute, the unwalkable highway. Incidentally, this is also an index of class (and in South African still racialised) privilege…

Psychogeography and street photography. We relish the pedestrianisation of parts of the inner city. We walk and in walking try to restore the city to human dimensions, anticipating, activating and mediating the human sensorium – but also exposing the city’s exclusionary practices, its overt and subtle forms of violence, its dead and deadening spaces.

In psychogeography, walking becomes a form of practical critique; an unmaking and remaking of space, a foothold to the future. Street photography, too, as an aesthetic practice, has historically been committed to the documentation of urban space as seen from the perspective of feet on the sidewalk; the walker, the flâneur.

But for now, the car is going nowhere — and not only because it is stuck in traffic. Can we imagine different ways of driving, ways to critique the world framed by the windscreen? How does the city look from the vantage point of a car? What kind of knowledge of urban space can driving afford us – speeding along the freeways, stuck in traffic, ordering from the drive-thru, navigating the high-rise parking garage?

The car remains a measure of status and freedom; its violence is often mystified, its alienation concealed. But the flâneur and the street photographer are likewise figures of privilege; and both are deeply gendered. And yet walking and photographing have been productively employed as methods in the social sciences and humanities. Can we do the same with driving? Not just a phenomenology of driving, but driving as method?

With all the ambivalence of a car in the city
Being of the street and
Not of it, just passing through

These lines from Jeremy Cronin’s poem ‘End of the century – which is why wipers’, from his wonderful collection More Than a Casual Contact (published by Umuzi in 2006) served as an important impulse for me to start documenting my drives: my long commutes, my fun drives, my quick dashes to the shops; in the city, on the freeway, in traffic, in the morning, at night. What is it that I (can) document when I’m driving? What do I see? What can’t I see? What can I know or understand about urban life, or about this specific city, Cape Town, from this mobile bubble of steel, plastic and glass, this weird vantage point of freedom and alienation? ‘Not of it, just passing through…’

The series of six images presented here is less a photo essay than fragments from a mutant psychogeography. They are double exposures: frames taken from a car over a roll of film that had already been exposed with images of domestic life and nature. The camera, an Olympus OM-1 from the mid-1970s, also had decaying lights seals, causing areas of over-exposure and adding to the dreamlike quality of the images.