The Geometry of Passing

In the nineteenth century, the flâneur was defined not by where he went, but by the rhythm of his wandering. He was a botanist of the sidewalk, a man who treated the city as a landscape to be read like a book. There is a strange, quiet dignity in the act of crossing a street. We move from one side to the other, leaving behind the familiar geography of a shopfront or a doorway to step into the open, exposed middle ground. It is a temporary suspension of our private lives. For those few seconds, we are untethered, existing in the space between where we were and where we intend to be. We are ghosts in the machinery of the city, visible for a heartbeat before we vanish into the anonymity of the next block. It makes one wonder: how many lives have we brushed against in the middle of a road, never knowing the weight of the stories they were carrying toward their own destinations?

Sergio Barrios has captured this fleeting transition in his work titled Cruzando. It reminds me that we are all just crossing paths in the vast, unfolding map of our days. Does it change how you walk through your own city to know you are always being watched by the world?