Walter Benjamin’s [The Arcades Project, 1927] interpretation of the concept of the flaneur as expressed by Baudelaire [Le Spleen de Paris, 1862] is that the contemporary flaneur is a figure that has nothing in common with the tourist, shopper, indefatigable walker, victim of the crowd, or instrument of capitalism. A flaneur takes pleasure in the haste and bustle of city streets, maneuvers through these crowded streets with the eye of an artist, yet is different from them.
Luca Pizzaroni well represents the postmodern flaneur.An active spectator of contemporary life and urban settings with an interest in the multiple facets of human disposition, he sets up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, amid the fugitive and infinite.His work has involved the creation of conceptually based sociopolitical sculptures,pictures and films which have been featured in museums,galleries and film festivals around the world.
He was co-author of Endcommercial: Reading the City, Hatje Cantz Publishers (2002), an analytical observation of recurring urban iconographies of over 60,000 images of New York and other cities. The book, containing more than 1000 images, has been widely acclaimed for creating a new visual vocabulary that describes the urban experience.