take a good look at the image below;
... what do you think?
Do you think, as I did that it's a snap of commuters or some such? The sort of picture you might find accompanying copy about the arrival of some person that is appearing in court to explain why they have been involved in a multimillion dollar scam or something like that. Not particularly notable as an image methinks....
Well it is actually one of the Queensland's GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art) acquisitions! I kid you not. Below, I've copied and pasted their blurb about it:
Beat Streuli
Bruxelles 05/06 2006
At the impressive scale of 200 x 280cm, Bruxelles 05/06 2006 is one of Beat Streuli’s largest and most recognisable works to date. First exhibited at Galerie Erna Hécey, Brussels, Bruxelles has also been displayed — within a billboard of Streuli’s works — as part of the 2007 ‘Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now’ exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Born in Switzerland in 1957, and now living and working in Zurich, Brussels and Dusseldorf, Streuli is highly regarded for his photography, billboards and transparencies, which present striking images of urban citizens and environments from diverse cities ranging from Sydney to New York, and Tel Aviv to Tokyo. Exploring the crossovers between portraiture, advertising and fashion photography, and employing a serial, almost pseudo-documentary style reminiscent of early ‘point-and-shoot’ photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Streuli is an expert in crafting strangely intimate crowd scenes. Through these, he reveals a fascination with individuals, while at the same time proposing an epic dimension to humanity.
In Bruxelles, three men walk through an urban environment, each engrossed by their own inner world. Motion is stilled so that we can inspect the physiognomy, the gait, the clothes and the expressions of each man, anonymously and unselfconsciously going about their business in a crowded city street. Their downcast eyes, grouped by the frame of Streuli’s lens, are recorded at the precise moment at which we can imagine them looking up to meet our gaze. The photograph evokes both movement and time. Here, we can be a voyeur who does not get caught out. We can also discern other atmospheric conditions in this work — air temperature, for example — and become aware of our own snap-judgments based on appearances.
Streuli’s work plays on contradictions between the natural and the stylised, documentary and fiction, publicity and privacy, human dignity and mass alienation, the contrived and the prosaic. Capturing scenes through a telephoto lens allows him the critical distance, without confrontation, to select his subjects. The privacy and anonymity of subjects in a crowd is shown to be violable through his lens, and it is precisely our judgments and histories that complete the portraits, which, oddly, on a grand scale, allow us to share an intimate space with Streuli’s subjects.
WHAT A LOAD OF OL SHIT!... as 'Nan' might say!
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