Front view
Inv. No.S-1517
ArtistBeat Streuliborn 1957 in Altdorf, Switzerland
Title

"Sydney 98"

Year1999
Medium

C-print

Dimensions50 x 68 cm
Edition/3
Comment

The lone person in the big city crowd has been a central theme of modern art since Poe and Baudelaire. For more than a decade the eye of Beat Streuli’s camera has been diving into the streams of passers-by in western metropolises. Streuli photographs from the distance with a telephoto lens. But his portraits of contemporaries, picked out from the anonymous streams of pedestrians, have nothing surreptitious or voyeuristic about them. The people are highlighted, but not laid bare, for the distance is reciprocal. The photographer’s distance and discretion match to the strange dreamy alertness with which pedestrians in big cities walk past one another. They size one another up fleetingly, but the short duration of the glances, however intense they may be, permits no indiscretion. As in Streuli’s works, everyone is very briefly skimmed over many times by the glances of many people, but nobody feels or behaves as if he or she is under scrutiny. 
(https://christopheguye.com)

S-1517, "Sydney 98"
Beat Streuli, "Sydney 98", 1999
S-1517, Front view
© Beat Streuli