A photographic flâneur through downtown Ottawa

It was an unseasonably cold and rainy day this past July when I started to get restless, feeling as though I had been stuck in the house all day, and sensing that my chronic cabin fever was only going to escalate into full-on “get-me-out-of-here-now” fast.

Realizing that the only way I would be able to rectify this feeling was to get out and go for a “flâneur”, or more simply put, a conscious stroll around the city, and around other ‘urbanites’, I grabbed my iPhone (my camera of choice for these kinds of urban wanderings) and headed for Elgin.

Dodging puddles and trying to manage both an umbrella and a smart phone, I let my curiosity decide where I would go or when I would turn, deciding it did not matter where I went, as long as I was aware of my presence in that space and time.

Now this is, of course, a highly popularized part of town, and many of the sights I saw were the same you would expect to see in any ‘tourist’s guide to the city’. But it was for those very reasons that I wanted to walk it, with no purpose other than to enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of Ottawa, and to be present in a part of town that belongs to both Ottawa as Capital, and Ottawa as home.

And so I flâneured.

Can you name these spots? The get a bit harder after the first one. 

Images by Kristen Gagnon