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Portraits de passant

Swiss photographer Beat Streuli has come to international attention in the photo and art communities for his images of the tempos of modern urban living, pictures of haste, movement, and time passing or even dragging on. Using a telephoto lens, he photographs unknown passers-by, mainly anonymous young people capturing their relationship to public space. Writing in Parkett #54, Trevor Smith comments that his work "makes palpable the psychological dimension of all urban situations. It explores the patterns of attention and inattention that people deploy to live in the city, to be in the crowd. The people in Streuli's images visibly negotiate their connection to their environment, the boundaries of their awareness are constantly shifting, expanding and contracting to dodge the city's shadows."

Swiss artist Beat Streuli takes the urban environment and its inhabitants as the central motif of his work. This monograph is a survey of his œuvre of the last 15 years, which includes billboards and large-scale window installations on the facades of public buildings, and a selection of his installations of slide and video projections.

Swiss-born artist Beat Streuli's central motif is the urban environment and its inhabitants. But his quietly mesmerizing photographs are neither documentary nor conceptual: rather, they lead us to a form of aesthetics that could be described as the "glamor of the usual." In this beautifully produced volume, Streuli brings together a new series of images taken in his current home town of Brussels--primarily in his own neighborhood near the center of the city. It is an area populated largely by immigrants from diverse ethnic groups. As essayist Katerina Gregos points out, "While the business of representing the 'other' can be a tricky and sensitive issue, Streuli's approach is refreshingly non-judgmental, and unpretentious, despite being decidedly voyeuristic." Here, large-scale portraits of passersby and inhabitants of the city compel the viewer to look at the European capital as a melting pot metropolis that is forging a new cultural identity.

Swiss photographer Beat Streuli has come to international attention in the photo and art communities for his images of the tempos of modern urban living, pictures of haste, movement, and time passing or even dragging on. Using a telephoto lens, he photographs unknown passers-by, mainly anonymous young people capturing their relationship to public space. Writing in Parkett #54, Trevor Smith comments that his work "makes palpable the psychological dimension of all urban situations. It explores the patterns of attention and inattention that people deploy to live in the city, to be in the crowd. The people in Streuli's images visibly negotiate their connection to their environment, the boundaries of their awareness are constantly shifting, expanding and contracting to dodge the city's shadows."