In the literature on Streuli there is repeated reference to his proximity to Walker Evans's Subway photos [10], for each of which the American took a photograph of the person opposite him in the carriage. The observation that the element of the seemingly chance in Streuli is not unlike Evans's is not untenable at base; but it overlooks the genre's sheer abundance of street scenes with passers-by, so that this alone is not a significant factor. The motif is also to be found in painting. Caillebotte, for instance, painting in the 1880s, had strollers cut by the edges of the picture as if they had walked across the artist's view, comparable to the photographer's situation when someone walking in front of the camera inadvertently blocks the view just as the shutter is released. Such considerations in turn do not take into account that accelerated pictures of the kind familiar today did not exist in Evans's or Caillebotte's day. Speed has influenced our perception fundamentally and the cinematic energy of the video and computer-graphic image brought overwhelming change in photography. The point stands even though Evans was inspired by the film still, since films, too, and the rate of cuts in succession in particular, have become faster since his day.
Time in Streuli's photographs has not only been arrested, but also made perceptible as the speed and movement of people. This is achieved in part by blurring or the off-centre location of figures in the composition.
Jean-Christophe Ammann speaks of Streuli's 'missing his subject when he takes a photograph' [12]. It is the overall situation, however, the mood and atmosphere in these pictures along with the societal information they convey, that constitute Streuli's central theme and thus the individual subject. It never subsists in the people alone.
The artist also makes a distinct feature of the fact that his photography is made up of picture sequences. Moving pictures, word and sound lend film and video a narrative potential unknown to the single photographic image. Streuli's photographic, but modern device is to work in groups of images which he projects fade-in/fade-out fashion, so anchoring his visual languages in the area between the static and the cinematographic picture [13]. The technique enables him to render tangible the dimension of time between two movements or 'stills' and to orchestrate loosening or compressing effects into the score of his sequences as he sees fit. So he brings still photography's serial potential to bear and discovers an untapped complexity in his medium.
Another effect of the slide projections is a visual opening of the projection walls and a virtual extension of the ambient space. The projected images appear to emanate their own light. The more sonorous, spatial lights in the photographic colours are mobilised. This light, emerging from a deeper stratum of the picture space, appears to radiate out towards the beholder from within.
Contemporary, media-imprinted society lives with a tide of advertising images dominated over by the large-scale photograph and the cursory glance has become the norm if not on occasion the only resort. Paradoxically, Streuli's images cannot be approached other than in calm contemplation [14]. The people in them, isolated out of bustling street prospects, come to view in a way they would not attain without Streuli's photograph. His method recalls advertising shots in which, again, the pictorial message is patently made the focal point [15].
contd - page 3 (page 2 of 3)
PHOTOGRAPHS OF MODERN LIFE from CITY - exhibition catalog, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and Kunsthalle Zurich, 1999 Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern
