© 2009 Kay Rousslang
Local photographer and Petworth native Kay Rousslang writes the A Flaneur in Washington blog. The term flaneur, from the French verb flâner, means “to stroll”. In Charles Baudelaire‘s essay The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire describes the flaneur as the ideal modern man, one who “sets up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” The flaneur “makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”
