Beat Streuli

Beat Streuli (b. 1957, Altdorf, Switzerland) studied in Basel, Zürich and Berlin. Following a period of photographing street scenes in black and white, in the early 1990s Streuli began to work in New York, in colour and in larger formats.

Travelling more and more, beyond Europe and the US, he became more broadly involved with the topics of migration and migrants. In his later work, a sense of the social situations he encounters in each city starts to appear – for instance in a series of photographs concerned with the multicultural neighbourhood of Molenbeek, in Brussels, where he himself lived for a time.

Streuli uses a telephoto lens for his photographs, and as such, those passing in front of his camera are generally not conscious that they are being photographed. He picks out individuals from amid the ever-changing stream of urban masses, a dynamic that, combined with his straightforward style, are somewhat reminiscent of advertising photography.

He photographs fragments of daily life in cities around the world – buildings, street signs, passers-by. He explains.

“Each day, you see so many different possibilities of how people live. I think I always found this mind-blowing – the sheer numbers and multitudes, watching all these people, sometimes trying to figure out what it might feel like to live and be like some of them. It’s probably my curiosity about life and human beings (including myself) which drives me to try and catch glimpses of all the millions of different sides of reality.”

Streuli’s photographs do not provide an overview – only a part of reality is visible, and his protagonists are never entirely within the picture frame. By photographing each city in the same manner, he reveals how urban-dwellers all over the world are both the same, and yet entirely different – from Tokyo (where one of the large photos also in the collection of the college was taken), to Cape Town.