he urban crowd in which Beat Streuli finds his images, mostly portraits or partial portraits of people, came into being more than a century and a half ago when Edgar Allan Poe gave this urban phenomenon its current geist in his short story, The Man in the Crowd. Try reading Poe’s short story while looking at Streuli’s photographs. It’s almost like an instruction manual, or a literary riff on Streuli’s images. Here, for example, is Poe’s narrator observing the passing crowd in London as he gazes out a pub window: “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.” Can you get more Streuli than that?
As with Poe, time and place count for Streuli. The video stills for his recent onestar press book 23-04-01 were made at the entry/exit of the Astor Place subway station in NYC on the title’s date. The artist caught people, with a Sony PC100 placed on a nearby café table, rising to the day light or descending into the subway, highlighted against the darker background: (from The Man in the Crowd) “The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.” Streuli’s photographs of the contemporary urban parade provoke the same feelings of irresolvable curiosity and tantalizing intuitions as those felt by Poe’s narrator; the same to and fro between “aggregate relations” and detail; the same compulsion to explore the unknowable. Poe got it right too when he compared the urban crowd to a certain German book that “es lässt sich nicht lesen” – does not permit itself to be read. Good thing then that Beat Streuli has given us his pictures to look at, striking enigmas of the man-made masses.
Richard Dailey (Paris)

Beat Streuli
04-23-01
Published November 2001

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2001 at 10:48 pm and is filed under afterartnews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.