Casual Encounters

In “Casual Encounters,” White reflects Baudelaire’s sensibility that found traditional art inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life, thus demanding that “the artist assert himself in the metropolis”—the heart of the flaneur. In 1977, Susan Sontag observed: The camera has become a tool for the flaneur. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world picturesque. We see this concept in the works of Eugene Atget, and later photographs of Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In the current urbanscape, Johnny Cubert White undertakes his photography by the same philosophy.