The first time we met, I thought Okan was a compatriot from Spain who had just moved to Paris... I was really wrong, we were actually born thousands of kilometers apart, and on getting to know each other, we could also confirm that we had really different backgrounds, past experiences, tastes and careers. But curiously life had brought us to the same place with very similar personal circumstances and we came to coincide on each other in a period of our lives in which we both spent our time as modern flâneurs.
And it was so because the city was calling us to roam it streets without haste, to drift around solitarily, following our instincts, without any final aim but to enjoy the infinite hues and details it was laying out for us. Without being aware of it, we fulfilled all the necessary requisites of such an occupation: ‘To leave without being forced in any way, and to follow your inspiration as if the mere fact of turning right or turning left already constituted an essentially poetic act.’ (Edmond Jaloux, ‘Le Dernier Flâneur’, Le Temps, May 22, 1936.)
Paris and its streets became our home away from home. Without a routine and hours to live by, it gave us the necessary calm to appreciate it, discovering its details lost at first sight, a spectacle only for those eyes gifted with the sensitivity it required. Well, although, like I said before, the differences between us are many, (fortunately for Okan!) it’s still true that we share that sensitivity that made it easier for us to enjoy the city and its sights, also architecture, music, beauty and art in general in their different manifestations. And we also share an enormous curiosity that pushes us to entertain the most diverse likes and interests. And I understand that these factors made us connect and start our friendship.
But I stayed at the edges of flâneurism, that of Poe and his "Man of the crowd", that of Baudelaire, that of Walter Benjamin's passages, whereas he went further, Okan took flâneurism to our contemporary times, which already in the century XX had changed to photography as a form of essays of impressions, he moved onto social networks of the XXI century, and started his great work of Parisbywalking on Instagram.
The above-mentioned Walter Benjamin, tells us in his book “The arcades project” “Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a century’s long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?” And this is exactly what Okan have set out to do with his systematical walks through the map of the city.
It may seem like an anachronistic figure in our society of hurries and tight schedules, daily routines that alienate us, cities whose agitation is hostile to passersby, citizens who do not take their eyes off their screens and walk oblivious to their surroundings, absorbed and isolated from it by their headphones. We do not walk: we move from point a to point b, and the path is just an annoying necessity between two activities, which we try by all means to make as short as possible or we practice sports absorbed in our thoughts and concerns, lost in the music we listen to.
But our age has endowed the flânuer with a specialized weapon that Okan has very cleverly donned: smartphones and instant connection, the internet. As we have already said, in the 20th century, with the development of compact cameras, the flâneur moves onto a new dimension: “ 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” Susan Sontag, from On Photography. Today technology makes it easier for us to act like entomologists in search of rare and beautiful specimens; collect, treasure and classify images, urban prints, visions of the buildings that cross our paths every day, whose free for-all beauty we’re actually disregard, their exciting stories left unknown to us, only so that once captured, we can then expose them and share them on digital platforms and social networks.
And this is what Okan has been known to do with mastery and great generosity, allowing other modern digital walkers to be participants in the beauty captured, cataloged and shared by clicking or sliding their fingers on touch screens. In this way they can also feed their curiosity and satisfy their craving for knowledge, be it aesthetic, architectural, historical or gastronomic, the last of which our bon vivant guide and guru is so passionate about.
And for those of you who haven’t been lucky enough to meet and enjoy this fun, humane, generous, intelligent and passionate person in real life, you can now thankfully access at least a little bit of him on Instagram and now on PARISbyWALKING.com.