Beat Streuli

From 1977 to 1980, Beat Streuli studied at the Schools of Art and Design in Basel and Zürich and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Since 1988, the focus of Streuli’s photographic work has been on anonymous individuals, often photographed from their heads to their hips. Due to his works’ large-scale formats (which usually measure anywhere between 137x201 cm and 450x700 cm) they exert a life-like physicality up on the viewer. While traditional street photography aims to capture a single, unique and ephemeral moment, Streuli seeks out unspectacular snapshots of everyday life in the city. He nearly always takes his photographs from an unobservable, almost voyeuristic standpoint using a 35mm camera with a telephoto lens. In his earlier works Streuli concentrated on capturing passers-by in public spaces. Today he is more intent on taking images of groups of young people who stem from various ethnic backgrounds. These photographs convey a positive image of a multicultural society, however, not unlike advertisements, they tend to ignore underlying issues that may exist amongst multi-ethnic communities.