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Street Photography Gabriel Cualladó. Rue de la Paix, París, 1962. Courtesy of IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Generalitat.

Editado por / Published by Producciones de Arte y Pensamiento SL

Fred Lyon. 17th Street Bar Opens at 5:00 AM, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Fred Lyon Studio, San Francisco.

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Lucie Awards 2015 Mejor revista de fotografía del año Photography Magazine of the Year Kraszna-Krausz Foundation 2003 Mejor publicación de fotografía entre 2000 y 2003 Best Photography’s Publication 2000–03

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SUMARIO / CONTENTS Editorial La calle como escenario The Street as a Stage

Rosa Olivares

La cรกmara en la calle The Camera in the Street

Kerry Brougher

Street Photography. El sonido de las calles Street Photography. The sound of the streets Lola Garrido

The cause of the rather sudden flowering of colour in the 1970s was probably due to a series of factors which included the legacy of the kaleidoscopic 1960s, the growing desire to exhibit photography in gallery settings, the widespread use of colour on television and in advertising, and the heightened stability of colour prints. Most notably of all the line between art and photography was increasingly blurred. The division between photography and the other visual arts had begun to break down in the 1950s around the time of Frank’s The Americans. Although photography had played little role in Abstract Expressionism’s autobiographical gestures, Frank’s work could be seen as an action-oriented correspondence to action painting. By the mid-1950s, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Bruce Conner began using found photographs as elements in their “combine paintings” and assemblages, while a few years later Andy Warhol introduced silkscreened photographs in his canvases and Ed Ruscha, under the spell of Robert Frank’s The Americans began making books using sequential “deadpan” photographs. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-1960s that photography seemed to secure its place in the art world; ironically, this passage came through the back door of Conceptualism. It was at this time that artists began to search for ways of going beyond Pop and Minimalism; for although these movements had succeeded in overthrowing the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, they had themselves become academic, almost corporate in their commercialism. The rise of Conceptualism, then, was an attempt to reinvigorate art with a sense of the radical and the political. One way to do this was to leave painting and sculpture behind for other means of expression, including written language, film, video and photography. Artists such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham began using snapshots in their work to create a kind of dumb anti-aesthetics that purposefully smacked of amateurism, a position that not only decried the growing commodification of art but also undercut the position of the art photography group and their notions of high art obtained through the purity of the photographic process. As noted by Andy Grundberg, Conceptual art “spawned a number of subspecies”, ranging from the photographs of altered or defiled landscapes by John Pfahl, Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams to the first rumblings of staged narrative photography in the work of Duane Michals, Mac

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Adams and Cindy Sherman, a movement that would increase in popularity in the 1980s.13 Suddenly photography was everywhere, not just in newspapers, magazines, and on billboards, but in the art world too. Often the use of the photograph by an artist was a direct comment on photography itself. This newfound acceptance of photography by the art community also seemed to open the doors for the endorsement of colour by the photographic community. Whatever the case, by 1976 William Eggleston’s work was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled Color Photographs, and the accompanying publication. William Eggleston’s Guide, was the museum’s first catalogue on colour photography. In his essay in that monograph, John Szarkowski pointed to “the lack of enthusiasm and confidence with which most ambitious photographers have regarded colour…”14 Indeed, the exhibition was highly criticised: the critics were unable to accept the tension that Eggleston purposefully created between his banal subjects, his rather ‘snapshot’ approach (no doubt influenced by both amateur photography and Conceptual art), and the deep, saturated colour achieved through a complex dye-transfer process. Recalling the three-strip Technicolor system, the expensive dye-transfer print is made by re-photographing a colour transparency three times with three different filters: red, green and blue. The black and white negatives are then used to make three ‘matrices’ of gelatin surfaces that absorb dyes in the associated colours. The complicated procedure, which results in a relatively stable colour print, allows the photographer exceptional control over the hues and saturation, something in which Eggleston excels. Thus Eggleston’s images are both familiar and cinematic, mundane in their choice of subjects, such as a car parked at the kerbside, or a gas station at a freeway ‘off ramp’, but, despite their rather restrained tones, sumptuous in their Technicolor-like depth. The colour, which is unlike the rather garish Kodachrome print or the bright, but the offset printing in magazines, seems to come directly from the real world rather than from the media. Ironically, Eggleston’s images, often taken from a car, seem to have a slightly dreamy, sometimes nightmarish quality that foreshadows later colour work, such as Jeff Wall’s backlit Cibachrome transparencies and, in cinema, David Lynch’s mundane yet quasi-surreal world. Eggleston’s street is

13. Andy Grundberg and Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, Photography and Art: Interactions since 1946, exhibition catalogue (New York: River Cross Press, Ltd., 1987). p. 138–139. 14. John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 1976). p. 8.

Beat Streuli. 8th Avenue / 35th Street 02, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

instrument is also evident in the work of Nikki S. Lee. A photographer who lives among various communities until she is accepted into them, Lee has snapshots taken of herself amongst her acquaintances. Like Friedlander and Winogrand, Lee infiltrates; unlike those photographers, who moved amongst others more or less unseen, she makes herself visible, an act which brings her closer to the position of Marville or Atget. In her work the photographer-voyeur is fully separated from the viewer ot the photograph; Banhes’ “operator” performs on the other side of the camera, fully in the picture, separated from the eyes of the spectator. Both Lee and Streuli break down the traditional relationship between camera operator, subject, and viewer. Streuli downplays the photographer as the controlling factor in the making of the picture, giving that role over to the subjects in the street, while Lee completely removes the photographer from the determinant position of image-maker. Streuli’s reduction of the importance of the apparatus parallels the thinness of his subjects’ emotional lives. Lee, by cutting the camera away from the from the photographer’s eye, reverses the photographe re-subject hierarchy, creating a mirrorimage relationship. There is a photograph by Atget entitled Vieille Boutique Empire, 21, Faubourg St. -Honore (ca. 1902), that depicts a Parisian storefront in a straightforward manner. However, reflected in the glass is the barely discernible presence of the photographer himself. If you look closely, you can just make him out, standing next to his plate view camera in the process of making the exposure. Like Baudelaire’s flanêur, Atget observes the city; unlike the writer’s solitary walker, however, Atget is a spectator subservient to the apparatus used to make the picture. Consequently, Atget and his camera haunt this picture, as every artist and camera inhabits each photograph. They are both there and yet not there. The street, as well as Atget himself, exists only through the camera’s alchemical powers. What we see is determined by the intimate relationship between the artist and the camera in the street. Kerry Brougher is the first director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. He has served as curator at several museums, most recently as the curator and acting director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. From 1983 to 1997, Brougher served as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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Karine Laval. Havana, Cuba, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York.

Sylvia Plachy. The lower east side, NY, 1988. Courtesy of Galería Blanca Berlín, Madrid.

Street Photography. El sonido de las calles Lola Garrido

Hablar de fotografía de la calle es hablar de la imagen en libertad, de esa que trata de revelar la realidad. Se ha asemejado en muchas ocasiones este tipo de fotografía al género musical de improvisación por excelencia, el jazz: unión de rigor formal e improvisación. Una de las cosas que diferencia a la fotografía de calle de la documental es que en la primera se puede oler la calle. La fotografía callejera, además, siempre beberá inevitablemente de la fuente de la cultura pop, porque la ciudad y la metrópolis son pop, la selva ideal (aunque no la única) que figura como ubicación perfecta para las instantáneas de la Street Photography. ¿Cómo definiríamos la fotografía de la calle? ¿Como símbolo de la libertad por la agilidad que aporta del movimiento cotidiano? ¿O como un baile de máscaras que se desliza ante el objetivo de un espectador atento? Quizás sea la cronista del relámpago fugaz que es el instante. ¿Pero es realmente libre el fotógrafo de la calle? Al comienzo, comparábamos la fotografía de la calle con el jazz, donde la improvisación juega un papel importante, pero la armonía debe ser perfecta. Si no fuera así nuestro oído no se sentiría cómodo. Un gran fotógrafo afirmaba que una foto tiene que funcionar de forma completa. No basta con que una parte de la foto tenga un encuadre perfecto, no. Todos los componentes de la misma han de tener la geometría propia de una ecuación matemática. El momento álgido de la Street Photography sucede en la década de los 60’s cuando Nueva York era el centro de la fotografía callejera, y en ellas los principales practicantes de ese género a veces se cruzaban. Lee Friedlander era amigo de Garry Winogrand, quien a menudo se reunía con Joel Meyerowitz mientras recorrían Manhattan y más allá, en busca de imágenes que captaban el ritmo

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de la ciudad, sus multitudes de dramas cotidianos y a sus ciudadanos en el trabajo y en el juego. Las fotografías, tomadas del mundo tal como es en ocasiones, se malinterpretan como una colección de observaciones aleatorias y momentos de suerte, o es confundida con el fotoperiodismo. No es así, porque sus practicantes buscan, olfatean, y siguen a los urbanitas que con ritmos rápidos y cambiantes pasan a ser los protagonistas esenciales de la llamada fotografía de calle. Cuando se pregunta su definición, lo más que encontramos es una coincidencia: esencialmente se trata de “una forma de trabajar, en la que hay que estar abierto a lo que sucede y olvidar estar a la espera del “momento decisivo”. “Música, melancólico alimento para los que vivimos del amor”, que diría Julio Cortázar (Rayuela, 1963). ¿Y no es acaso ese alimento del que toma vida la fotografía de la calle? Contaba Mason Resnick que Garry Winogrand tenía una técnica única: vivir lo fotografiado. Se adentraba en el caos, y hacía de él una orquesta que respondía a su batuta. Robaba el instante recibiendo una sonrisa o un intento de agresión a cambio y, entre disparo y disparo, siempre buscaba un enfoque que a veces no era el correcto, disparando incluso sin mirar y además sin buscar la luz adecuada. Como resultado, un trozo de historia improvisada. Una narración perfecta. Podía ejecutar miles de disparos en un día. Sabía que el momento dependía de que él hubiese apretado “el gatillo” o no. Era un cazador en el caos urbano, a la búsqueda de lo que encontraría después. Dicen de su modo de trabajar que era “como un elefante a punto de estrellarse contra un escaparate de una cristalería”. Fue el más agresivo, el más obsesivo, el que parecía tener menos tiempo.

Jan Yoors. Broadway, 1964. Courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, New York.

Jonathan Hibgee. Courtesy of the artist.