The Photographers of Modern Life
Unlike other visual arts, the sine qua non of photography is presence. Wanderlust is not only a common affliction of photographers, but necessary for its practice.
Creativity exists at the crossroads of conscious action and surreal thought. We create art when we are in a place which not only matches our surreal thoughts, but allows us to capture them. The artists at Apogeo Photos practice being a Photographer of Modern Life, attentive to the fundamental concept that the world around us at any given moment is beautiful, and worthy of observation.
These values were elevated to the status of an approach to literary criticism in the essays of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin, among others. To describe the approach, these authors used the term flâneur. The word is French, and means, roughly, "stroller" or "lounger." Being a flâneur is a state of physical behavior matched to a philosophical attitude. In his essay, The Painter of Modern Life (to the title of which we pay homage), Baudelaire described the philosophy and approach of the flâneur:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.
We hope you agree that this selection of images reflects Baudelaire's conception.
The Heart of Paris
Notre Dame
New York Stories
Queens to the Upper East side,
and points in-between.
Drowning
in Venice
Gentle heart
in Rennes, France
Chiaroscuro
in Istanbul
Southwest by
Mid-Atlantic
Glimpses of rural Pennsylvania
Light of God
in Notre-Dame-en-Saint-Melaine de Rennes
All Saints
in Florence, Italy
50 Souls
at Mont-Saint-Michel
Ridiculous to Sublime
in Prague
From the ashes
ever resilient in Saint-Malo