AOR: Album Oriented Recordings

Street Photographer as Recording Artist Part Two

Welcome to Really Abstract where I post abstract street photography recorded while wandering aimlessly but aimfully, now that I’m a full-time flaneur.

As discussed in my previous post, Street Photographer as Recording Artist, I approach my photography project as recording sessions directed toward producing an album. This idea grew organically over several trips to Paris where I came up with my idiosyncratic style of street photography. Without client, commission or contract, the eventual album served as a focal point as the project developed on the hoof image-by-image.

Prior to becoming a full-time flâneur in mid 2025, I made five albums for my own pleasure. I came to call this the Quotidian Jones Project after the name of the third album. These albums are being “remastered” into posts now that I have a platform on Substack.

While it wasn’t originally intended, it is clear to me now that the first four albums formed a cycle, a tetralogy, if you will, while I worked out what I thought I was doing with my camera. Though I was never before able to articulate it so succinctly, this might have been the project’s artist statement in the form of an aphorism:

Postmundanity recorded by Quotidian Jones in the style of Lyrical Realism is Really Abstract.

The first album, Really Abstract, recorded in France in 2018, outlined what became branding for the project. The abstraction of expressionism combined with the realism of street photography for pictures that are really abstract.

The second album, Lyrical Realism, recorded in Toronto in 2019, was focused on developing a style of abstraction, the concept cribbed from a school of abstract expressionism known as lyrical abstraction.

The third album, Quotidian Jones, recorded in Paris and Toronto 2020 and 2021, formed an identity for the project. I was thinking of Quotidian Jones like the name of a rock group even if it was a one-man band.

The fourth album, Postmundanity, recorded in France and Toronto in 2023, defined the subject matter of the project as contextuality, as minutiae taken out of context and blown out of proportion, beyond mundanity, into a new context of postmundanity.

The fifth album, Like There’s No Tomorrow, was recorded in Toronto in 2024 and 2025. It was made during a period of great transition as I was preparing to leave behind the life I’d been living for twenty years. I imagined Quotidian Jones as an alter ego, trying the pseudonym on for size, while wandering around capturing the images.

My next posts will dig deeper into each of these five albums in turn, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a teaser of a new image from this summer in Tours:

New albums of images recorded this year in Paris and Tours are coming soon.