Some hold that there are  two kinds of photographers, collectors and sculptors. Sculptor type photographers are those who set up a scene,  creating it from scratch,  and then take a picture of it.  In contrast, collector type photographers  wander, bringing things home that they find out in the world and they  often have a vague idea or kind of personal fantasy that they look for out in the world.

The process of wandering is central to my Leica snapshots. When I walk the city my route is seldom pre-conceived and I am not looking for very specific things. I did not  have a list of things to photograph  in my notebook.  I would often walk with the standard poodles. 

This was especially the case when I travelled to Melbourne to explore the CBD. The Situationist's dérive --a drifting  urban walking journey that entailed playful constructive behaviour. So it is different from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll. Following the algorithm in a dérive through the city, one would encounter the unexpected and be forced to view one’s surroundings in a new way.

 The Situationist's   “situations” were not random acts; they were constructed interventions with organized aesthetic aims and political rationale to counter  the manufactured desire of the spectacle. This phenomenology  to free up perception was an art  praxis for reconnecting art to life.

The  associated concept of détournement referred to the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble--- what postmodernism would come to understand as a deliberate, politicized use of irony and pastiche--that aimed to denaturalise existing urban reality. 

The artistic point of the renewed or defamiliarized spaces  is to create the lived poetics of the “situation” in opposition to the culture generated by the capitalist spectacle. It is using art against representation and  reconstructing a poesis out of the signs of the times.