Flanøren / the flaneur
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The new Museum of Copenhagen in Stormgade opened in February and has separate galleries or rooms for each of the distinct periods that together make the city what it has become …. the periods of construction and expansion that, together, explain the stages through which the city developed.
Space in the museum is good but certainly not limitless so objects from the collection in the different displays have been selected with care because they have to explain their part in a clear but sometimes fragmented story about important events and different periods of growth and of change.
In one of the upper rooms there is a display about the city in the late 19th century with a large model of the new city hall at the centre … a building that was finished around 1905. This was the period after the ramparts and the gates of the old city were dismantled, so it was a period when the city began to expand outwards and the number of people living here increased rapidly. It was also a period of amazing developments in technology and in manufacturing … a period when trams appeared in the city and telephones and flushing toilets … a period when their lifestyle then seems familiar and not actually that different from our own lives now.
This particular part of the story of Copenhagen has been told by focusing on eight types or characters or professions from that period. People who have been chosen to represent the ways in which life was changing.
They include the Tram conductor; the Kiosk attendant; the Architect and the Engineer … so that's two jobs that were new in the city and two increasingly-important professions. There is also the part of the story of life in the city that is told through The Child because so many schools were built in this period and it was when education became available for more people and changed more and more lives. There is Cyclisten - or the cyclist - representing both new popular transport but also to show that this was a period with more leisure time for more people, and there is Kanonfotografen or the street photographer and Flanøren.
For fairly obvious reasons the last two - Kanonfotografen and Flanøren - were of particular interest ………
By profession I'm an architectural historian and a social historian but, throughout my career, looking at photographs and taking photographs have been essential parts of my work … so, taking photographs as a record; using historic photographs as important and reliable evidence that document change and using carefully-selected photographs to get across information in books and exhibitions and lectures. But I would not describe myself as a street photographer even though now I spend much of my time in the street taking photographs.
There are two types of street photographer covered by that broad term:
The first - and the focus in the museum in the gallery about the late 19th century - could be described as commercial photographers who took their studio to their customers and often, but not always, with a mobile dark room. They were taking pictures of people in the street who wanted their photographs taken - or were persuaded by the photographer that they wanted to have their picture taken. Street photographers produced the outdoor version of the studio portrait.
Until I saw the camera in the museum, and the background information with it, I had not understood just how quickly street photographers became common in the city or just how popular they were right through to the 1960s. There is one view of the square in front of the city hall that appears to show at least three cameras set up so trade must have been good and clearly, for many visitors, part of a good day out in Copenhagen was to have a photo taken.
Presumably, some of these photographers moved across to using polaroid cameras but as these became cheaper, and people could afford their own Polaroid camera to take their own instant pictures, and then, as Polaroid cameras were, in turn, replaced by cheaper and cheaper digital cameras and then phone cameras, these street photographers disappeared.
Of course, where they have resurfaced is with the photographers who work the fashionable streets of cities like New York or London or Milan and take pictures of people on the street because of their clothes or their style and then post the images to Instagram …. but that’s another story.
The second type of street photographer in Copenhagen were the photographers who photographed the streets and of the buildings and of life on the streets in the city and their works can be seen throughout the museum.
Some were taking photographs of the new streets and new buildings or of the historic buildings for books or for magazines or to sell as prints or for popular postcards and major events in the city were photographed - particularly for newspapers. Some photographers where taking photographs to document and to reveal social situations or social interactions and would now be described as a photo journalist rather than as a street photographer.
One of the first and perhaps the greatest of the early photographers to record everyday and more mundane aspects of life in a city was the French photographer Eugène Atget, who, working in Paris, took photographs of unlikely subjects like alleyways or shop windows or piles of old clothes in second-hand shops. There were also major American photographers like Paul Strand and then Walker Evans, who recorded the reality of the life of the poor. They would not have described themselves as street photographers but that was where they worked.
The Danish photographer Jacob Riis was actually eight years older than Atget. Initially, he was a journalist but then became a photographer and is now described as a documentary photographer. Riis emigrated to New York when he was just 21 and worked there rather than in Denmark so I am not sure how much his work influenced photographers working here but certainly there are amazing photographs in the city archive that record the slums and the alleys of the city that have long gone so photographers in Copenhagen were not simply interested in polite and middle-class subjects.
Kongens Nytorv ….
photographs taken around 1900
above all,
these photographs show just
how much space
cars need and take
the photographs
are from the City Archive
street camera
in the Museum of Copenhagen
not all the old photographs of Copenhagen are of the affluent streets and squares - this is Adelgade where the old house were deemed to be slums and were demolished in the 1950s
At first I was perplexed by that word Flanøren until I read the information panel where it explained that it comes from the French flâneur … a word translated as loafer if you want to be rude or, in some dictionaries a flâneur is defined as “an elegant idler” which is marginally more polite but not much more.
And they were mostly young men that you see in the photographs. Apparently, they had also called themselves Boulevardiers so obviously they strolled backwards and forwards along the fashionable streets and through the squares of Copenhagen seeing and being seen. It is fascinating that this was clearly a time when anything French had to be good …. from the boulevards to the mansard roof.
I realised that I spend much of my time walking up and down the streets of Copenhagen to take photographs but I don't think anyone would call me elegant - idler maybe - but elegant no unless it was with irony.
Kongens Nytorv by Paul Fischer
Both the paintings and the photographs by the Danish artist Paul Fischer - he took photographs as a first stage for composing his paintings - show how the public space of the streets and the squares then played an important part in everyday life in Copenhagen and, significantly, well over a century later, the way that people in the city use the public space of the streets and the squares continues in much the same way.
Walk along Sønder Boulevard - particularly on a Friday evening after work or on a sunny Sunday afternoon - and you'd probably assume that the large number of people sitting outside and the number of children playing and the number of people using the sports courts or exercise equipment there must all be part of a relatively recent Copenhagen - a Copenhagen with much more leisure time - but, actually, using public space for exercise and for socialising has a strong and well-established history.
Copenhagen was tightly constricted by the city ramparts and even in the 16th century it must have felt crowded …. after all, the first deliberate expansion of the city was with the building of Christianshavn in the early 17th century.
Certainly through the 18th century and the 19th century, it must have felt as if everyone was living on top of each other. Through to the 1860s, when the ramparts and gates were dismantled, houses and people were tightly packed together. Over the centuries, because the city could not expand out beyond the defences, garden plots and courtyards were built over and if you look at older houses that survived the numerous fires then you can see that most started with two floors or two main floors with basements and attics but over the years nearly all of them had extra floors added so they were enlarged to three and then four and finally five floors of apartments. And, as now, if an old and low house was demolished then what replaced it was inevitably taller.
Even after the ramparts were removed and the city was able to breath … imagine taking off a tight corset after three centuries … it was not the end of densely packed housing. The new districts of Nørrebro and Vesterbro were built outside the ramparts but both areas had and still have some of the most densely-packed areas of housing in Europe. That's one reason why the public space of Sønder Boulevard, running across the south side of Vesterbro, is now so important for the people who live in the area.
It is hardly surprising that people in the city took over the streets and the squares and the wide roads immediately inside the ramparts and walked on the broad path on top of the ramparts as places to exercise and socialise. The King's Garden was opened to the public in the late 18th century and citizens have been using it ever since. Families stroll through the cemeteries in the city at weekends and there are traditions for taking the first walk in the Spring around the ramparts of Kastellet or taking a Sunday walk along Langelinie to look out across the Sound. Even Tivoli seems to be as much about walking and talking and sitting and drinking as it is about rides and thrills.
If Coronavirus has proved one thing it's that it's hard to keep Copenhagen indoors.
