Miami-based photographer William Riera has called himself a flâneur since he first picked up a camera — but flânerie, the art of wandering a city on foot, was never really built for Miami, a place where walking is closer to an anomaly than a way of life. In this essay, Riera traces more than two decades of his own street photography practice, from riding buses aimlessly through Havana as a young man to documenting Miami's urban shrines, its emptied pandemic streets, and the neighborhoods that gentrification has slowly made unrecognizable to him. As his connection to the city's sidewalks thinned, so did his output — until he realized the practice hadn't disappeared; it had simply moved behind glass.

That realization gives the essay its title and its argument: the windshield flâneur, a way of looking built for a city that stopped making room for its own walkers. Drawing on his own archive alongside the photographic road-trip tradition of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, and Stephen Shore, Riera describes a practice with two halves — the drive itself, framed by the windshield before a decision is even made to look, and the rarer moment of pulling over to become, briefly, a pedestrian again. It's a personal essay, but one many South Florida photographers will recognize themselves in, and it closes on an open question Riera still hasn't answered: what happens to that practice, and to this idea of home, when he's finally free to leave. Read more »