DIRTY FINGER PRINTS

Pete Volich

15 October - 27 November 2010 | CCAS Gorman

Casting himself as a modern day flaneur, a 19th century man of the crowd described by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe, Pete Volich excavates and documents the secrets in urban spaces.

The flâneur was part detective, part journalist and part social investigator. He was an urban observer, collecting and recording urban images and social interactions, and his search for meaning was a continual process of knowing public space which led to existential completion. The flaneur made a connection between the fluidity of things in the city and the physical negotiations of the space by himself, becoming "the secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city" (Tester, 1994). While Walter Benjamin stressed that photography actually negated the role of the flâneur as each face was given a single meaning and no longer had anonymity, Volich employs the mediums of photography and video to collect and document history and its multiple interpretations and meanings.

Image: Pete Volich, Attempting to say cheese whilst remembering the Kellett St massacre, 2009