STUDIOVOICE #2 — Beyond Documentation: Street Life and Seven Photographers of Europe

The original text was written in Japanese for STUDIOVOICE in December 2011. This English version translates and edits the archival text for KLEINSTEIN TEXTS.

Street Life: Seven Photographers Who Looked at Europe

Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Beyond the Record

We live in a time when photographs are often dressed up as graphics. The subject alone no longer guarantees the condition of a photograph. Before speaking about the seven photographers in this exhibition, it is worth remembering the world in which they worked.

Photography was born in the nineteenth century. In its earliest years, exposure could take hours, and the possible subjects were severely limited. Only later, as technology shortened exposure times, did the human figure begin to enter the medium more freely. When one dry plate had the weight of an expensive object, photography carried an aura different from the one we casually swipe past today.

The exhibition text explains that, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, these photographers recorded changing societies, expanding cities, and everyday street corners after the Industrial Revolution. But their work is more than an archive of facts. In Bill Brandt’s photographs of Glasgow backstreets, for instance, one sees not simply a street but the density of human presence beyond the street as a screen.

Seen from the present, monochrome photographs produce a particular sensation: the feeling of waking from a dream and finding the real world stranger than the dream itself. The works gathered here influenced many photographers who followed. Yet the value of the exhibition is not merely historical. It asks us, at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, to place the emotions of the past beside the lives we are living now.

To look at these photographs with the history of technique in mind is to notice both the difficulty of making them and the distinct temperament of each photographer. Documentation, at its best, does not end at record. It opens a door through which the present is forced to look back at itself.

Street Life: Seven Photographers Who Looked at Europe
Artists: Bill Brandt, August Sander, Thomas Annan, John Thomson, Heinrich Zille, Brassai, Eugene Atget
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, through January 29, 2012.