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?
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omeone once said that a photograph shows effects without causes. In other words, a photograph will always be less than reality. Thanks to an endless paradox, however, photography affirms itself as the faithful double, the mirror that can not be tarnished, and the mouth of light. Thus it is for the images that Gwen Smith has chosen for two books that have come out two years apart: Tropic (2001) and Cancer (2003). Two images of the same place, one before and one after, visibly, shredded and enlarged to fill hundreds of pages. What then do these details hide? They conceal exactly that which can be conceived only through touch and memory, non-representable experience, antagonist of the true imprint in which photography participates. They avoid saying that there is always a tenacious and modest tie (remember, by the way, that the titles of course evoke Henry Miller on the shores of Brooklyn facing Manhattan) that is absolutely essential between space and the lived, the body and the image. It goes without saying that these photographs put before us the unthinkable. But also, in absentia, they tell us how history proceeds in great leaps, tragic and extraordinary: a roof was there, before us. It has disappeared.
ike a child who puts together images, photos and drawings make albums, Matthias Herrmann presents us in this with “a collection of images and ideas that have a certain importance”. Maybe it’s the brief phrase at the beginning that suggests this comparison with a child: “The contents this book could be disturbing for children; owners of book should not let children have access to it”. That said, the suite of photos, self-portraits, quotations, extracts ads for sex toys, extracts from the artist’s intimate journals, covers magazines… has a very charming intimacy, almost innocent. Among photos where the artist represents himself naked are mixed in pornographic pictures that seem almost outmoded, as if an adolescent to his first sexual urges gathered them. Then there are quotations run the gamut from Groucho Marx to Doug Aitken, not to mention Robert Gober, Rirkrit Tiravanija and the cry taken up by Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzione siamo Noi”. Throughout the book the reader has impression of participating in the private life as well as the artistic Matthias Herrmann, and the book ends on a almost silent outburst: large format image of an ejaculation followed by a panel inscribed over, followed by an erection and then it’s over… strange comfort the same time insinuates an eternal return, of sex, of war, of life.
