Streetnotes

Front Cover for Streetnotes Volume 19

This preface to the new Streetnotes introduces readers to the Streetnotes project to publish socially descriptive poetry, photography, ethnography and essays, which address the documentary experience. In differentiating itself from other media outlets which record ‘daily-life’, it invites concrete-based theoretical interventions into urban forms and encourages contributions, which document and address the challenge of the city to think about the near and distant character of social relations.

Preface to Streetnotes: New Europes.

The first series is called "Kryry May Day". Kryry is a provincial town about 55 miles west of Prague, population about 2,500. As you will see, May Day is still celebrated here in the Czech Republic but it has turned into (or perhaps re-turned to) a carnival. I was specifically interested in the red, hammer-and-sickle, Soviet flags flying here and there. I thought it an anachronism twenty years after the fall of the Soviet bloc. And no doubt there's a strong element of the carnivalesque in it, and yet, and yet... it all depends on who or what is being "carnivalized." I call the second series "Prague Pictures," it's self-explanatory.