[Winter 2026]

Photography Bogged Down in the Crevices of the Internet
by Alexis Desgagnés

[EXCERPT]

“Yo! We’re back with another episode of Walkie Talkie!” That’s how Paulie B, the nickname of the New York photographer and content creator Paul Baldonado, introduces the videos in his Walkie Talkie series. As I write this article, the series, available on YouTube since 2021, has about seventy episodes. I went down the rabbit hole for a few weeks watching them, and I wanted to make some sense of all those hours of people getting filmed while they take photographs and talk about their practices. So, I’d like to try to draw from their words some reflections about photography in the current era, which is so strange and so full of shifting sands.

Paulie B’s ambition, stated at the beginning of the series, is both modest and democratic. He undertook to collect stories from the burgeoning community of photographers constantly walking the streets of New York. So, he simply filmed conversations with them as they wandered around midtown, downtown, Chinatown, Coney Island, and other districts. As the episodes continue, Paulie B travels to other major US cities (notably, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Houston) and even abroad (Naples, Rome).

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 131 – Collecting ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Photography Bogged Down in the Crevices of the Internet]

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Artist, author, and teacher Alexis Desgagnés lives in Montreal. Éditions du Renard has published his artist books Banqueroute (2016) and Ammoniaque (2021). With Serge Clément, he is the co-author of Métamorphose (2025), co-published by VU and Les éditions Loco.