About the Work
Passers-by have a part to play! From a suitable distance, the Swiss photographer zooms in on people in the crowd who are unaware of his camera. Lost in thought, they leave the New York subway at Astor Place station: a man in his mouse-grey blouson; a woman with the bread she has just bought; another woman with a Stephen King horror story under her arm. Beat Streuli finds the cast for his 'Short Cuts', which in the meantime have been condensed into an encyclopedia of individually narrated world faces - in Athens and Tokyo, Bangkok and Cape Town, Sydney and Jerusalem. Streuli's stage accommodates all city dwellers, as is the case with Peter Handke, who let them walk silently through his play 'The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other'. The one-act play first inspired Claus Peymann in Vienna in 1992, Jürgen Gosch in Bochum in 1993 and Luc Bondy in Berlin in 1994 to share Handke's position as an observer at the edge of a Mediterranean piazza and to have dozens of figures walk across the square in curiously individual attitudes, knowing nothing of each other. In Robert Altman's feature film 'Short Cuts' the people look authentic; in Beat Streuli's pictures they are.
