---
title: The best images are the ones you never photograph
description: Explore the art of wandering in cities, where connections and experiences matter more than destinations or photographs. Rediscover the joy of flânerie.
image: https://www.protagx.com/hubfs/AI-Generated%20Media/Images/High%20Line%20Dancers%20in%20Red%20Among%20Wildflowers%20and%20Steel%20Tracks.png
---

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# The best images are the ones you never photograph

![On walking as a form of thinking, the art of analog wandering — and what one afternoon on an abandoned rail line in Manhattan changed for good.](https://www.protagx.com/hubfs/AI-Generated%20Media/Images/High%20Line%20Dancers%20in%20Red%20Among%20Wildflowers%20and%20Steel%20Tracks.png)

- May 24, 2026

![Christian Schappeit](https://www.protagx.com/hubfs/bbb3f9f2-cb0f-400d-a27e-fa77c104bb11.jpg)

[Christian Schappeit](https://www.protagx.com/en/ddd/author/chris-martin-s)

##### Data Divers Dialogs  ·  Essay

On walking as a form of thinking, the art of analog wandering — and what one afternoon on an abandoned rail line in Manhattan changed for good.

I learned to wander in New York. Not as a technique. As a posture. Just walk, without knowing where — and stay open to what the city shows you when you let it. I had done this instinctively in Berlin for years, a camera around my neck and no fixed plan. But I only understood what it actually meant one afternoon on the High Line.

##### The flâneur — a figure who refuses to arrive

## Paris, Berlin, and a radically inefficient idea

There is a word for it that was almost forgotten before it was needed. The *flâneur* — that figure from 19th-century Paris who drifted aimlessly through the arcades, absorbing the pulse of the city without becoming part of it. Walter Benjamin, Berliner and cosmopolitan, turned him into a philosophical type: anonymous in the crowd, observing, penetrating. Someone who doesn't want to get from A to B, but simply wants to be on the way — because being on the way is the destination.

A century later, the Situationists imported this idea and radicalized it. Guy Debord invented the *dérive*: the purposeless drift that follows architecture, chance, the pull of a square. No route, no intention. Only the question: where does this space want to take me? They called it psychogeography — the study of how a place affects the person who doesn't resist it.

> "The dérive is radically inefficient. It produces no result. It leads you nowhere — except perhaps somewhere you have never been."

What makes this idea so durable: it resists optimization. You cannot improve a dérive with an app. It only works when you stop trying to control it. And that, I've come to understand, is not a romantic practice from another century. It is a posture — the willingness to move slower than the city around you, so you can actually see it.

New York — the High Line

## The afternoon that explained everything

The High Line is itself a story about wandering. Built in the 1930s as an elevated freight railway, then abandoned, left to silence for decades. While the city debated whether to tear it down, over 210 species of wild plants took root in the old tracks. Nature reclaimed what people had given up on. In 2009, the first section opened as a public park — a mile and a half of old rail running through Chelsea to the Hudson Rail Yards. An industrial relic, transformed into one of the most unlikely meeting places in the world.

I happened to be there when a performance began.

People in red robes moved into the crowd of walkers. Quietly at first, almost invisibly. And then — like a flash mob, but without the urgency, without the noise — the dancing started. It was the company of Naomi Goldberg Haas: *Dances for a Variable Population*. Older adults, woven into a choreography that excluded no one and forced no one to keep up. Each dancer moved according to their own range. Those who were slow were slow. Those who sat, sat — and danced anyway. Those who watched were already part of the performance.

> "It was inclusion perfected — on an abandoned rail bed, between wildflowers and steel, thirty metres above the noise of the city."

I didn't take a single photograph. Not because I didn't have a camera. But because the moment was too real to look at through a lens. The images formed in my head instead. The sharpest kind there is.

Naomi and I didn't lose touch after the performance. Years later, when she was in Berlin for a shoot, we met up — on the edge of the set, the way you meet up when you're in the same city and you know the other person is there. What had begun as a chance encounter on an abandoned rail line in New York had become a connection that spans continents.

You never know who you'll meet. But sometimes you meet them again.

The circles you draw

## Why it was never about the photographs

That is the heart of everything I did afterwards. The photowalks through Berlin — sometimes with one person, sometimes with fifteen people I had never met before. The "Food in the City" series: moving through neighbourhoods, eating at places no guidebook mentions, listening to the people who cook there. The purposeless wandering with strangers that always ended up somewhere unexpected.

It was never about the photographs. Never about the food. Always about the people you meet along the way. The stranger who shows you the courtyard you would never have found alone. The sentence someone says that you don't forget. The moment when strangers become people you know — not because you planned it, but because you were open.

I think we have forgotten how to do this. Not because we are lazy or indifferent. But because every app, every notification, every platform tells us that productivity means speed. That encounters can be scheduled. That the best route is the shortest one.

It isn't.

I built **[encirkl.com](https://encirkl.com)** because I believe this is exactly what we need today. Not another platform that optimises connection. But a place that makes it possible — in the only way that actually works: by setting out without knowing what's coming.

 Zukunft ist kein Zufall. Sie ist smart.

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Christian Schappeit - Unternehmensberatung für Digital Business Consulting und Datenintegration.

Als erfahrener CRM-Integrationsexperte und CMS-Stratege bin ich spezialisiert auf den Einsatz führender CRM-Plattformen wie Hubspot und Salesforce Health Cloud, ergänzt durch leistungsfähige Integrationstools wie Mulesoft. Mein Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Konzeption, Implementierung und Optimierung von datengesteuerten CRM-Systemen, die speziell für Unternehmen im Gesundheitswesen und in der Forschung entwickelt wurden. Ich bringe fundiertes Fachwissen bei der Erstellung und Verfeinerung von CRM-Strategien, der Verwaltung der nahtlosen Integration von CPQ-Prozessen und der Entwicklung effektiver Plattformen für Kunden- und Patientenbeziehungen mit, die die Patientenversorgung und Kundenzufriedenheit verbessern sollen.

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