Beat Streuli

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the protagonists of the pictures are ignorant of being photographed and are pinned down at moments in which they seem withdrawn and unaware of their effect on their surroundings, unconnected even when accompanied by another.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.