Faces in cities are forgettable. They have neither name, nor body, nor desire. This is how urban masses are: a host of perfect strangers on the move. Beat Streuli (b. 1957) photographs precisely this: human beings strolling amid the bustling throng in the streets of big cities. In the manner of the great masters of “street photography” – William Klein, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand and Harry Callahan – Streuli sees the city as an ideal stage for his work. Focusing on the metropolis’ social grid in a way that is slightly more distant and less critical than his predecessors, Streuli, in the crowd, chooses his models solely on the strict criterion of knowing if they are interesting and expressive. He observes their gestures, their facial expressions, and the movement of a hand or their hair. It matters little who they are, what they think, or why they are there and not somewhere else. In this register of anonymous characters, nothing biographical or psychological emerges about the subject. For a split second, and unbeknownst to them, the mere fact of freezing them in a frame through the telephoto lens reinstates their identity as singular subjects, albeit ever replaceable. The real cruelty of the urban centre is that it undermines our yen for perpetuation. For USA 95 II, Beat Streuli used an almost filmic device. In a dark room, he set up a slideshow along one wall with three screens in a line. By way of an ingenious system of multiprojections and superimpositions, the scenes come one after the other like a sequence. The images follow one another, are sometimes superimposed and, at others, disappear in a dissolve to black, paradoxically giving rise to an intriguing atmosphere of peace and quiet. On the one hand, the viewer is aware of the confused bustle of the city and, on the other, he penetrates the series of appearances and stereotypes forming it. So, almost against his wishes, the spectator, alone in the darkness of the room, starts to imagine stories and create links between images, based on his own experience as a city-dweller. With Streuli, the intended contamination between images represents one of the main gestures of his work. Composition, form, colour and volume are all factors that are part of his grid. Whence the close attention he pays to details: the orangey colour of a wall, the detail of a car’s door, and the hand which all of sudden moves across the lens. As if it were a piece of jazz, Streuli’s images converge and diverge, like an open-ended composition in which details are linked together with faces, or confront one another, in an unending dialogue of distinctive features which end up by forming a unity. At times the image focuses on a person, at others on a group. An elegantly clad, long brown-haired woman, wearing sunglasses, looks at the ground; now the same woman, a little closer; a few seconds later, from slightly further away, almost imperceptible. Another woman moves along the three screens, at three distinct moments in her stroll; a group formed by two men and a woman who seem engrossed in a lively discussion... or... perhaps they don’t know each other.

Marta Gili
Translated by Simon Pleasance