Swiss photographer Beat Streuli (born 1957) draws connections between his early black-and-white photographs and more recent photographs, installations and video stills from the past seven years. Accompanying this chronology are essays on themes of urbanism, sociology, perception and media.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Salome Schnetz, Beat Streuli. Text by Raymond Bellour, Roberta Valtorta, Jonathan Watkins.
The urban photographs of Swiss artist Beat Streuli (born 1957) record what he calls “the glamour of the usual”--people walking the streets in familiar states of pedestrian reverie, photographed with professional care (“glamour”) but without drama (“the usual”). Public Work 1996–2011 surveys his large-scale installations in public spaces.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Text by Laurent Busine, Katharina Gregos.
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.
Beat Streuli's photographs of street scenes from the metropolises of the world offer momentary shots of everyday life. Usually, the protagonists of the pictures are ignorant of being photographed and are pinned down at moments in which they seem withdrawn and unaware of their effect on their surroundings, unconnected even when accompanied by another. Projected by Streuli as large-format slides or in endless loops on television screens, the photos lift the individuals out of their relative insignificance and fix them in museum-like immortality. Over and over again, the Swiss-born artist finds himself drawn to New York, where he succeeds in taking pictures that contain a special brilliance, with passersby stepping out into bright sunlight from behind shadows cast by skyscrapers. In these pictures, architecture, billboards and the colorful surfaces of passing trucks often serve as background fragments for people who are constantly rushing, forming images that evoke the paintings of the American photo-realist school. This book of photographs, published in a limited edition and hand-signed by the artist, presents a recent selection of Beat Streuli's New York works.
Published by Hopefulmonster. Essays by Alessandra Pace, Roberta Valtorta,
Beat Streuli uses techniques from photojournalism, advertising and documentary filmmaking for his photographs, videos, and slides. His main interest lies in capturing the expressions and gestures of people absorbed in their daily lives on the streets of large metropolises. The Result is a series of interesting portraits of contemporary society, collected in the pages of this fourth catalogue in the "Sightings" series, that, for the exhibition at GAM of Torino, have been made in the cities of Torino, Chicago, East Jerusalem, Enghien and Yamaguchi.
PUBLISHER Hopefulmonster
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.25 x 11 in. / 112 pgs / 82 color
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788877571182TRADE List Price: $18.00 CDN $20.00
Beat Streuli: Public Work 1996-2011
Beat Streuli: BXL
Beat Streuli: New York
Beat Streuli
