The Cruel Radiance of Glamour:
Beat Streuli’s View of
Urban Pedestrians
Beat
Streuli, New York 01, 2002
Deutsche
Bank Collection, (c)The Artist. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich
Ordinary
passers-by radiate in his large-scale photographs like anonymous stars.
For years, Swiss artist Beat Streuli has been photographing people in
major cities around the world: office employees, kids, joggers, workers,
managers, housewives. Streuli’s images endow their subjects with an
incongruous glamour; at the same time, the zoom lens seems to reveal a
violence and force residing in everyday life. Brigitte Werneburg
visited Streuli in his adopted city Brussels.
Beat
Streuli, Krakow October 05, 2005
Courtesy
Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf and Beat Streuli
Brussels is grey these days, on the weekend of the art
fair. But the fair is not where I’m headed. I’m going to meet Beat
Streuli, who has been living here in the Belgian capital for the past
three years, alternating with his other home in Dusseldorf.
Streuli’s
apartment is in the old part of the city, a lively area with narrow
streets that haven’t yet been hit by the typical inner-city renovation
boom. "In a certain respect", he says, gazing around, "the city is a
miniature version of Berlin", not least due to the cheap rents. A hazy sky
like the one above Brussels right now does not appear in Streuli’s works.
Everything seems steeped in a bright light, in an almost crystalline
clarity. Maybe that’s why a sentence keeps coming to mind by the American
journalist James Agee
that I recently read: "the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the
heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can." To my mind,
this perfectly expresses the special secret of Streuli’s work and the
enduring fascination for his photographs and video films. His latest works
can currently be seen in Berlin
and Leipzig.
Beat
Streuli, Martinique, o.J.
Deutsche
Bank Collection,
|
©www.fiftyfifty-galerie.de
|
|
Looking at a sun-drenched street, Agee remarks, shifts
attention "from the revisive to the effort to perceive simply the cruel
radiance of what is." Nowhere is this cruel radiance captured as precisely
as in Beat Streuli’s work. He finds it in the people populating the
light-imbued streets in the major cities of the world; in the individual,
whom he photographs with a zoom lens in the midst of the moving masses.
His photographs deliver a valid definition: the cruel glow is glamour.
People walking through the major cities of the world look good in his
work. The close crop, with its extreme contrast in depth of field between
background and foreground, emphasizes this effect: people’s hair shines in
the light, their skin glows like velvet, and they look fashionable with
their expensive sunglasses, headphones, and more recently cell phones, all
of which enhances the fresh, modern liveliness of the urban scene. Yet the
special attraction of their gestures, gait, and facial expressions, both
individually and in relation to one another, also lies in the
absent-minded, self-evident way in which they move through their everyday
lives.
Beat
Streuli, Osaka, 2003
©Beat
Streuli, 2004 and Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf
It
has often been remarked that Streuli has a positive attitude towards the
people he covertly photographs. He concedes that his images are easily
recognized in the bright, sober living spaces among the generous modern
furniture. "I think it’s the insistence in my view. One always notices a
certain itch, a fascination. Actually, though, when people see one of my
photographs somewhere, it’s hard to figure out why they immediately know
that it’s a Streuli."
Beat
Streuli, Osaka, 2003
©Beat
Streuli, 2004 and Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf
Yet
this strong position does not yield psychological portraits. Beat Streuli
gazes with a certain indifference at the urban environment in which
people, architecture, transportation, and advertising constitute a densely
interwoven interacting surface pattern. And it’s on this surface that
glamour’s "cruel" radiance is born – the radiance that Beat Streuli seeks
to record in his work.
Beat
Streuli, New York, New York, 2000/2002
Deutsche
Bank Collection,
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
