Stephen Waddell's photographs of solitary figures in an urban environment convey his interest in the relationship between painting and modern life, incorporating the influence of Beaudelaire in the search for the mythical in the everyday.

In this way, Le Clochard takes on a particular significance, as do all of Waddell's isolated figures. The deep-seated roots of the vagrant as a figure in urban evolution has informed its mythical status, rendering this figure simultaneously representative of past, present and future. Beaudelaire, who spoke of the 'heroism of modern life', would have noted the importance of contemporaneously marking the re-appearance of this historical antecedent.

Relationships can be drawn to the first secular full figure paintings shown alone against an abstract background, such as Velasquez' The Jester Pablo de Valladolid and Manet's The Absinthe Drinker . A nurse, a secretary, a pedestrian are all repetitive figures with mythical underpinnings which hold a historical and future relationship to our own present metropolitan experience; the American photographer Garry Winogrand claimed to have repeatedly seen the same eight or ten people through his camera lens throughout his career.

Rather than depicting individuals, the figures in Waddell's photographs are thus representative of a particular archetype. The relationship to Manet in particular is intensified by Waddell's status as a painter. Compositions are informed by painterly criteria; thus Le Clochard becomes a study in form, colour and gesture as the figure is wholly abstracted from his environment.

Ultimately, street photography is about knowing that these stories reappear time and again, and are captured by the artist inhabiting the space of the observer, the flaneur.