Beat Streuli

Life

From 1977 to 1983, Beat Streuli attended the Schools of Design in Basel and Zurich and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin where he lived until 1987. Studio grants followed at Cité des Arts and Fondation Cartier in Paris (1985/86, 89 and 92), at Istituto Svizzero in Rome (1988/89), in London (1997), and at P.S. 1 in New York City (1993).
Since then Streuli has spent time and worked in cities such as New York City, Sydney, Düsseldorf, Zürich, and Brussels.

Work

Beat Streuli is known for his street portraiture, which has documented the anonymous urban citizen in various cities all over the world, from Sydney and Tokyo to Athens and New York. Streuli’s photographs focus systematically on ordinary street dwellers, and the contemporary ‘flaneurs’ going about their daily business. The heterogeneity of the crowd, as the central component of the cultural dynamism of modernity, and the position of the individual in the crowd, lie at the core of Streuli’s practice. He works with a variety of presentation media, from large-format colour photographs, and installations of slide and video projections, to billboards and large-scale window installations on the facades of public buildings.

His camera freezes or distills the flow of everyday life, the movement of people in the city, reflecting on daily reality from an entirely anthropocentric perspective. Photographing with the use of a telephoto lens, Streuli captures his subjects in an unguarded state, bringing them in close proximity to the viewer, lending them an iconic aura which transcends the ordinariness of the scene portrayed. Although they remain anonymous, equal under the lens of the camera, a sense of individual lives and diversity emerges. The viewers are implicated through the shared experience of negotiating public space, the natural state of watching and being scrutinized, of moving and paying attention.

Selected exhibitions

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