All Streuli’s subjects are photographed in much the same way, which creates a sense of uniformity and therefore brings a sense of objectivity to the enterprise. “There are different ways of using our eyes: you can fix something or just take it in,” he points out. “In the first case, one is much more focused, selective and intentional, in the second, one is more neutral, you could almost say ‘democratic.’ My way of taking pictures corresponds more to the second case.” He sets up his camera on a tripod, across the road from a busy junction or street and frames passing faces from a distance through his telephoto lens. “I think it is easier to look at things against a neutral background, and this is why I hardly ever take pictures in poor suburbs where the social problems are obvious.” Instead, he homes in on recreational areas such as shopping centers; the two series from Sydney were taken in 1998 and 2002. He avoids the dramatic in favor of mundane, inconsequential moments. Consequently, he has been said to “dismantle the decisive moment,” and his work manifests an unspectacular way of seeing. Critic Katerina Gregos suggests, “The street society he photographs is the society of the ‘unspectacle,’ a vision of ordinariness which in its entirety alludes to the quotidian human condition.” The telephoto lens affords Streuli anonymity and his subjects rarely know they are being photographed. As a result, their faces are caught unaware; one wonders what can be seen in a face that does not know it is being watched; what is revealed, when we are unguarded and unposed? Walker Evans posed similar questions with the series he took on the New York subway between 1938 and 1940,
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when he surreptitiously photographed fellow commuters. Evans’s monochrome imagery reveals passengers with almost vacant expressions, seemingly lost in thought and endeavoring to avoid the gaze of others. When the images were finally published as Many Are Called in 1966, he said, “As it happens, you don’t see among them the face of a judge or a senator or a bank president. What you do see is at once sobering, startling, and obvious: these are the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” Yet, Evans’s faces, like Streuli’s more contemporary ones, remain impenetrable; little can be gleaned other than perhaps a sense of disengagement. What can we learn from Streuli’s imagery? Gregos suggests it reveals that “the reality surrounding us has become more fractured and complex.” She adds “that contemporary life in the public arena has become less engaged and more autistic; that we all conduct ourselves less as part of a social whole and more as individual ‘monads,’ cut off from what happens around us.” She also invokes the work of twentieth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel who explored the relationship of “the metropolis and mental life.” Simmel developed the notion that a defining experience of living within a city is that we are forced to live among people who remain forever strangers. These thoughts paint a bleak scene, although perhaps there is something to be gained by living among strangers. Streuli’s photos expound on the uniformity of the contemporary urban experience; the pictures of Sydney replay around the world. Yet, recalling Crace’s words at the outset of this essay, they reveal the pleasure, or “the blessing” of getting swept away in the crowd.