Stephen Vincent: Walking Theory

(Courtesy of Wood's Lot)

Interview with Stephen Vincent
by Tom Beckett
E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S



In Walking Theory, I also began to expand my concept of a walk to include other activities, including reading books, acts of the imagination, and remembrance. Walking became a metaphor for strolling through any of these parts of the world. Transversions are also my own way of walking among and being in dialog with the writing material of others. Walking or not, every act becomes a kind of critical reading and response, as well as a form of opposition to a life of passive, cultural consumption. Maybe hyperactive in spirit, I have never been good at sitting back and soaking things up like a sponge!

...

Writing is a constant invocation of ghosts. In the passage of time, moment-to-moment, everything becomes ghosted. Nothing is permanent. The objects I encounter and photograph permit in my writing a dialog that gives me, and the work, a larger imaginative life in what is a quite diverse neighborhood, a neighborhood of ghosts. ...

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