A living archive
in public space.

The artifact is the medium.
The archive is the artwork.

Walking Distance releases small hand-numbered photographic zines into public space — on park benches, café tables, train seats, and sidewalks. Each artifact carries a unique ID and QR code. When found, participants log the encounter: an approximate location, an optional note, an optional photograph. No account is required.

What accumulates is a living documentary record — a map of chance encounters, a timeline of movement, a growing public archive of the moments when a stranger picked up a printed object and chose to add their trace to it.

The project is not about virality or performance. It is about the slow accumulation of honest, small data points from people who happened to find something in the world and took one minute to say so.

Documentary photography as distributed archive.

Walking Distance sits at the intersection of documentary photography, participatory art, and public archive practice. It draws from traditions including mail art, Situationist psychogeography, community archiving, and the everyday documentary — while operating in a specifically contemporary mode: a physical object with a digital shadow.

The project is not a tracking exercise or a social media campaign. The archive is not about reach or follower counts. It is about the accumulation of genuine, unsolicited encounters between a printed object and a stranger — and the quiet decision each finder makes about whether to leave a trace.

Each artifact record becomes a kind of biography: releases, sightings, cities, silences, photographs, notes left by people who may never meet each other but are now permanently part of the same document.

Available for institutional engagement.

Walking Distance is available for collaboration with galleries, museums, libraries, universities, community organizations, and editorial publications. Possible engagement formats include:

• Targeted release partnerships — coordinating artifact releases within or around an institution's programming, expanding the archive's geographic and community scope.
• Archive exhibition — presenting the public archive, sighting data, and artifact trail maps as a display component within a physical space.
• Educational programs — using the project's documentation methodology as a framework for community archiving, documentary practice, or participatory art workshops.
• Research collaboration — the public archive data is available for research in areas including urban mobility, participatory documentation, and community art practice.
• Editorial coverage — high-resolution images of artifacts and archive documentation are available for press and editorial use with attribution.

Bartosz Koszowski

Walking Distance is created by Bartosz Koszowski, a Polish-born documentary photographer based in the Boston area. His work explores place, memory, community, and the accumulation of small, honest details that constitute everyday life.

This project extends his documentary practice into a form that moves through public space, gathers traces from strangers, and produces an archive that is genuinely collective — composed of hundreds of small decisions by people who happened to find something left for them.