The Shape of Walking

In 1961, Canadian artist Michael Snow created a simple silhouette of a woman mid-stride. He called it Walking Woman.

What followed became one of the most quietly radical gestures in postwar Canadian art. Repeated across paintings, plywood cut-outs, and photographic situations between 1961 and 1967, the figure appears in galleries, on walls, and even among real pedestrians in the streets of Toronto.

In this episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume explores how Michael Snow transformed walking into a conceptual form. While street photographers of the 1960s chased fleeting moments on sidewalks and intersections, Michael Snow constructed a walker who never moves yet endlessly persists.

Through repetition, seriality, and a constant silhouette, Walking Woman reveals something fundamental about photography: the tension between movement and stillness, chance and structure, the fleeting body and the image that remains. 

Images, references, and links are available at
photographyandwalking.com

En 1961, l’artiste canadien Michael Snow crée la silhouette simple d’une femme en pleine foulée. Il l’appelle Walking Woman.

Ce geste donnera naissance à l’une des propositions les plus discrètement radicales de l’art canadien d’après-guerre. Répétée dans des peintures, des découpes en contreplaqué et des interventions photographiques entre 1961 et 1967, la figure apparaît dans les galeries, sur les murs et même parmi de véritables passants dans les rues de Toronto.

Dans cet épisode de Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume explore comment Michael Snow transforme la marche en une forme conceptuelle. Alors que les photographes de rue des années 1960 poursuivent des instants fugitifs sur les trottoirs et aux intersections, Michael Snow construit une marcheuse qui ne bouge jamais et pourtant persiste indéfiniment.

Par la répétition, la sérialité et une silhouette constante, Walking Woman révèle quelque chose de fondamental sur la photographie : la tension entre mouvement et immobilité, entre hasard et structure, entre le corps fugitif et l’image qui demeure. 

Images, références et liens disponibles sur :
photographyandwalking.com

—
Music: Beat ’em with Rhythm - Victor Natas (CC BY 4.0 / freesound.org)

Produced by Productions 3655 Inc.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

So in nineteen sixty one, the Canadian artist Michael Snow created a flat silhouette of a woman midstride. He called it walking woman. She is neither a portrait nor a character. She has no face, no expression, no psychology, just an outline. A contour of a female figure caught forever in the act of walking, one leg forward, one arm slightly extended, from head to feet in profile. She is not a photograph. She is not even a representation of a specific person. In fact, she is a shape. The silhouette is unmistakably female, and today one might wonder about that choice. A woman reduced to outline, deprived of face, voice, or individuality? Some listeners may hear that through a feminist lens. Yet Michael Snow's project moves in another direction. His interest is not the representation of women, but the transformation of a simple figure into a repeatable visual system, a way of thinking about walking itself. Michael Snow first exhibited The Walking Woman Works in Toronto in nineteen sixty two at the Isaac's Gallery. Over the next several years, he would repeat her, paint her, cut her out in plywood, and remake her across different materials. Place her against walls, install her in galleries, and crucially, situate her in the streets of Toronto, where she stood among actual pedestrians. These works collectively known as walking woman works, nineteen sixty one, sixty seven, form one of the most quietly radical gestures in postwar Canadian art. Because while photographers in the nineteen sixties were walking the streets, Michael Snow built a walker. This was also a moment when artistic boundaries were loosening. Modernist painting in Canada was shifting. Sculpture was flattening. Photography was being reconsidered not merely as documentation, but as art. Michael Snow moved fluidly between painting, sculpture, film, and photography. He was less interested in depicting life than in examining how images operate. So walking woman is not about telling a story of the city, it is about perception itself. The early nineteen sixties were a fertile moment for street photography. Henri Cartier Bresson had already established the idea of the decisive moment, the split second when gesture and form align. In New York, Gary Winegran roamed the sidewalks restlessly, embracing instability, allowing figures to tilt and edges to fray. Lee Friedlander layered reflections and shadows into complex compositions. Diana Arbus turned her attention toward individuals on the margins confronting the camera with unguarded intensity. Walking was central to this practice. The photographer walked, the subjects walked. The city unfolded through movement. Street photography depended on contingency, on being present at the right corner, at the right instant, when two strangers crossed paths and when a shadow sliced across a face. In nineteen sixty seven, John Sarkowski would crystallize this shift in the exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art. Documentary photography, he argued, was no longer about social reform. It had become a vehicle for personal vision. The photographer was not a neutral recorder, but an author shaping experience through the frame. But Michael Snow's walking woman predates that institutional reframing. Beginning in nineteen sixty one, six years before new documents, Michael Snow sidesteps the debate altogether. He doesn't chase walkers, he doesn't frame gestures, nor does he wait for the decisive instant. He eliminates the instant. So what happens when walking becomes a symbol instead of an act? This is the question at the center of walking woman. Unlike the figures captured by street photographers, Michael Snow's walker does not move. She is permanently midstride, forever advancing, yet never arriving. She contains the idea of walking, but none of its unpredictability. There is no beginning, no destination, no interruption, no stumble, no encounter. Street photography thrives on singularity. Each person in a winogram frame is irreducibly specific. Each crossing of paths is unrepeatable. Michael Snow, by contrast, removes individuality. His walker is generic, anonymous, reduced to contour, and he repeats her. Seriality is crucial here. Michael Snow does not produce one walking woman, he produces many. The same outline appears across different supports and contexts. Repetition dissolves narrative. The figure ceases to be a character and becomes structure, a unit. Art historian Martha Langford notes that dualities run through Michael Snow's work, thick and thin, window and wall, presence and absence, and walking woman sits right in that tension. The outline remains constant, but its material life shifts. Sometimes she is plywood, sometimes metal, sometimes painted in solid color, sometimes carrying photographic imagery within her contour. The figure is stable, but the conditions are not. In this way, Michael Snow shifts, walking from an event to a system. If the street photographer depends on what happens, Michael Snow depends on what persists. And this contrast becomes especially vivid in Toronto. In the late 1950s and early nineteen sixties, Michel Lambeth was actively documenting the city's sidewalks and intersections. His black and white photographs capture pedestrians in motion, couples passing storefronts, individuals pausing at corners, figures absorbed in private thought. His viewfinder responds to the flux of urban life, attentive to posture, to glance, and to timing. One can imagine in those same years Michel Lambeth turning a corner with his camera while Michael Snow positions a flat cutout of his silhouette nearby. Michelle Lambeth waits for a body to enter the frame. Michael Snow makes one. But this is not a competition between practices. It is a divergence of questions. For Michel Lambeth and for street photographers more broadly, walking is lived. It is embedded in time. It produces photographs because it unfolds unpredictably. The camera arrests that unfolding, preserving a fleeting arrangement. For Michael Snow, walking is abstracted. He isolates the stride itself, the archetype of forward movement, and detaches it from lived temporality. His walking woman does not produce the photograph. She precedes it. She exists before the camera arrives. When Michael Snow places the silhouette in the street and photographs it among real pedestrians, something quietly destabilizing occurs. The artificial walker stands among moving bodies. The static meets the mobile, and the symbol confronts actuality. Photography, which typically freezes movement, is now documenting a figure that was never moving in the first place. The inversion is subtle but profound. Street photography depends on chance encounters. Michael Snow manufactures one. The tension between the cutout and the surrounding bodies generates a different kind of awareness. We notice the outline because it repeats. We notice the living pedestrians because they will soon leave the frame. And in this encounter, walking becomes visible as a structure rather than an event. There is also a formal austerity to the silhouette itself. The contour never changes, one leg forward, one arm angled, head in profile. Across the series, from modest cutouts to larger freestanding figures, the scale shifts, the materials shift, the colors shift. Sometimes the interior is solid paint, sometimes it carries photographic imagery. But the outline persists. Michael Snow does not individualize her. He stabilizes her. That restraint matters. In the nineteen sixties, the human figure in photography could be loaded with social meaning poverty, alienation, eccentricity, rebellion. Michael Snow removes that weight. His walker is neither subject nor symbol in the narrative sense. She is a sign in motion. And yet precisely because she never moves, she raises a different tension. Walking implies destination, it implies before and after. But Michael Snow's walking figure is suspended. She will never be stepping forward, she will never reach the corner. She will never exit the frame. If street photography captures the fleeting presence of bodies in time, walking woman captures the idea of walking outside of time. There is a kind of quite humor in this. The silhouette placed in the bustle of Toronto stands indifferent to traffic and weather. Pedestrians pass by, the city evolves. The cutout remains unchanged. Its forward motion is permanent and unreal. And repetition intensifies this paradox. Because Michael Snow multiplies the figure, walking becomes rhythm. Not one woman, but many, not one stride, but an ongoing pattern. Seriality drains biography and replaces it with recurrence. In this sense, walking woman participates in a broader shift toward conceptual thinking in art. The artwork is not a single object, but a system of reiterations. Meaning lies not in the development of the story, but in the persistence of the structure. For a project concerned with photography and walking, this shift is instructive. Photography often records walkers. It follows them, anticipates them, intersects with them. Michael Snow reminds us that walking can also be imagined, diagrammed, reduced. One of the thoughts walking woman offers is what is more enduring? The fleeting body caught in a decisive moment or the silhouette that never ages? So the street photograph preserves an instant that has already vanished. Michael Snow's figure was never alive to begin with, yet she persists. Perhaps this is why walking woman feels at once playful and austere. It acknowledges the ubiquity of walking, the most ordinary urban gesture, and distills it to its outline. It does not dramatize the city. It does not document its inhabitants. It inserts a constant into variability. Where photographers sought unpredictability, Michael Snow sought repeatability. Where they embraced chance, he embraced structure. And so she continues her stride, forever midstep, never arriving, never departing. Around her real walkers move through intersections, descend subway stairs, pause at traffic lights. Photographers frame them, waiting for alignment, for expression, for the decisive instant. Michael Snow's walker does not wait. She does not hesitate. She remains the same. She is the idea of walking, held in suspension. And perhaps that suspension, that impossibility of arrival is what makes her endure. This is Photography and Walking. I'm Philippe. You can see related images and references for this and other episodes on the website, photographyandwalking.com. If you'd like to follow the series, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Thank you for walking with me and see you next time.