Global Exposures: Blur Street and Interurban Self-Portraiture (a Photo-Essay)

Abstract

The photo-essay that follows offers a brief illustration of Blur Street, a transnational pedagogy project that creates visual conversations about contemporary formations of urban identity. An initiative led by Kathleen Irwin, Rachelle Viader Knowles, and myself (Laura Levin), Blur Street takes the form of a series of workshops in which students from different national contexts use video imagery to situate themselves and each other in their respective local environments.¹ This process of reciprocal imaging is displayed on a shared website, where participants post two-minute edited video sequences and view the urban self-portraits of their international counterparts. Using the city as laboratory, students are asked to identify urban behaviors that do and do not easily fit into conventional narratives of national or local character, and are invited to imagine alternative kinds of self-world affiliation.