THE WORLD ATLAS OFSTREET PHOTOGRAPHY 1 1 From ‘A City Refracted’, Graeme Williams, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2012–14 THE WORLD ATLAS OFSTREET PHOTOGRAPHY JACKIE HIGGINS FOREWORD BY MAX KOZLOFF YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON NORTH AMERICA LATIN AMERICA 6 FOREWORD 16 NEW YORK 92 MEXICO CITY 8 INTRODUCTION 18 JOEL MEYEROWITZ 94 FRANCIS ALŸS 20 YASMINE CHATILA 98 MEXICO CITY BY ALEX WEBB 394 INDEX 24 GUS POWELL 100 OSCAR FERNANDO GÓMEZ MONTERREY 398 CONTRIBUTORS 28 VERA LUTTER 102 EDI HIROSE LIMA 398 PICTURE CREDITS 32 NEW YORK BY AHN JUN 104 CLAUDIA JAGUARIBE RIO DE JANEIRO 34 MATTHEW BAUM 106 JULIO BITTENCOURT RIO DE JANEIRO 38 PETER FUNCH 110 ANA CAROLINA FERNANDES RIO DE JANEIRO 42 NIKKI S. LEE 112 SÃO PAULO BY JULIO BITTENCOURT 46 PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA 114 CÁSSIO VASCONCELLOS SÃO PAULO 48 BRUCE GILDEN 116 LUIS MOLINA-PANTIN CARACAS 50 LOS ANGELES 52 MIRKO MARTIN 56 UTA BARTH EUROPE 60 LOS ANGELES BY OLIVO BARBIERI 62 ANDREW BUSH 64 KATY GRANNAN 122 LONDON 124 GILLIAN WEARING 68 CHICAGO 126 SLINKACHU 70 MICHAEL WOLF 130 RICHARD WENTWORTH 74 DAWOUD BEY 132 LONDON BY RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG 76 DOUG RICKARD DETROIT 134 SHIZUKA YOKOMIZO 80 PAUL GRAHAM DETROIT 136 HANNAH STARKEY 84 WIM WENDERS HOUSTON 140 WOLFGANG TILLMANS 86 JEFF WALL VANCOUVER 142 POLLY BRADEN 144 MATT STUART 146 NILS JORGENSEN 148 ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN BELFAST CONTENTS AFRICA ASIA 150 PARIS 238 JOHANNESBURG 314 SOHEI NISHINO JERUSALEM 152 JH ENGSTRÖM 240 SABELO MLANGENI 316 BIRDHEAD SHANGHAI 156 LUC DELAHAYE 242 NONTSIKELELO VELEKO 320 YING TANG SHANGHAI 160 MOHAMED BOUROUISSA 244 JOHANNESBURG BY SUE WILLIAMSON 164 SOPHIE CALLE VENICE 246 GRAEME WILLIAMS 322 BEIJING 168 MASSIMO VITALI VENICE 250 MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY 324 SZE TSUNG LEONG 170 GREGORY CREWDSON ROME 254 ESSOP TWINS CAPE TOWN 328 JIANG PENGYI 174 JOHNNIE SHAND KYDD NAPLES 258 DAVID GOLDBLATT CAPE TOWN 332 ZHANG DALI 176 CRISTÓBAL HARA XINZO DE LIMIA 262 JO RACTLIFFE DURBAN 336 WENG FEN SHENZHEN 178 TXEMA SALVANS VALENCIA 266 GUY TILLIM LIBREVILLE 340 SHENZHEN BY POLLY BRADEN 270 PIETER HUGO LAGOS 342 YANG YONG SHENZHEN 182 BERLIN 272 VIVIANE SASSEN MOSHI 184 ALISA RESNIK 276 EDSON CHAGAS LUANDA 346 TOKYO 186 SUE WILLIAMSON 278 RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG DAKAR 348 DAIDO MORIYAMA 188 BERLIN BY VERA LUTTER 282 MIMI MOLLICA DAKAR 352 NOBUYOSHI ARAKI 190 THOMAS RUFF DÜSSELDORF 286 YTO BARRADA TANGIER 354 NAOYA HATAKEYAMA 192 HANS EIJKELBOOM AMSTERDAM 358 TOKIHIRO SATO 196 OTTO SNOEK ROTTERDAM 360 OSAMU KANEMURA 200 TRINE SØNDERGAARD COPENHAGEN 204 ALEX WEBB ISTANBUL AUSTRALIA 364 DELHI 208 OLIVO BARBIERI ISTANBUL 366 RAGHU RAI 292 TRENT PARKE SYDNEY 368 SUNIL GUPTA 212 MOSCOW 296 NARELLE AUTIO SYDNEY 372 MACIEJ DAKOWICZ MUMBAI 214 BORIS SAVELEV 298 BEAT STREULI SYDNEY 374 MAX PINCKERS MUMBAI 216 MOSCOW BY SLINKACHU 302 SYDNEY BY NARELLE AUTIO 378 PETER BIALOBRZESKI MANILA 218 MELANIE MANCHOT 382 JOEL STERNFELD DUBAI 222 SERGEY BRATKOV 304 MELBOURNE 384 MARTIN PARR DUBAI 226 ALEXEY TITARENKO ST PETERSBURG 306 BILL HENSON 386 AHN JUN SEOUL 230 BORIS MIKHAILOV KHARKOV 308 JESSE MARLOW 390 MICHAEL ITKOFF HANOI 1 1 Young Man with Sunglasses, Coney Island, Max Kozloff, New York, USA, 1997 FOREWORD How uncommon, but fitting, to find the word “atlas” used in the title BY MAX KOZLOFF of this groundbreaking book of photographs. To thumb through its pages is to encounter widespread images of cities, arranged by continent and region. Many of these places are captured by impassioned forms has increased in the academic world; and the division between visitors, as well as by locals. Whatever their origins, they take into public and private spaces has been confounded. Faced with these account cosmopolitan trends promoted by global cultures. That fact challenging circumstances, photographers have reacted with a makes for convergences in styles and ideas, even though the look of discursive strategy of their own. We often find in their statements a things is naturally differentiated by the particulars of geography. The desire to tell a story, as if to compensate for the prevailing reticence images chosen for inclusion in The World Atlas of Street Photography of unscripted actions to speak for themselves in single images. No have been filtered through the traditional obligations of the street wonder so many photographers work in series or have resorted to genre itself, which is valued for its credibility as urban witness. They video in order to reiterate points of view and to gain narrative have been selected because they are arresting or thought-provoking momentum. They have switched from being members of hunter- images of our urban landscapes. gatherer societies to a more organized stage as pictorial Traditionally, street photography acts as a portmanteau term agriculturalists. Instead of foraging for content, they grow it in crops. that covers a range of idioms centered on the built environment and The images in this book offer a harvest of new ambiguities. the experience of those who perceive the human traffic around it by Photoshop manipulation instigates, often without acknowledging, means of the camera. They have usually served civic, political, editorial, the metamorphoses of bodies. Models or stand-ins replace those who and journalistic functions. We encounter these channels in such projects might be thought the original actors in a scene. One no longer knows as David Goldblatt’s portraits in South Africa, Joel Meyerowitz’s whether a tableau represents an occasion or a re-enactment born documentation of the 9/11 ruins in New York, and the Magnum from a photographer’s mind. Here, street photography becomes a photographer Alex Webb’s evocation of Istanbul. Guided by more subspecies of performance art, activated by proxies engaged in personal and artistic motives, much of the work featured here apparently self-generated activities. Yet these tactics do not prohibit ventures into equivocal terrain; it retains the imagery of the streets gestures that are genuinely empathetic, or references to historic but blurs the question of how they’re peopled. The Essop Twins, injustices or adversities that must be taken seriously. What is at stake devout Muslims in Cape Town, stage a didactic theater about cultural is not the integrity of the act of witness, which has been sidestepped, clashes, using themselves—surreptitiously—as models. Nikki S. Lee, but a mode of feeling, even if it is built on a conceptual artifice. a South Korean formerly based in New York, pretends to be a habitué People pose for portraits out in the street. People walk past or into a of cliques with which she was on only professional terms. From one camera snare without being aware of it. They are spied on, for purposes practitioner to the next, the old rule that observation should be they might object to. Yet each of them becomes a creature momentarily faithful to an external reality has itself become debatable. Instead active in the imaginative world of someone else. None of them are any of remaining opportunistic spectators of passing scenes, they have longer in that world, which lives on only as an image. Yet it makes a become agents involved in posing situations, with the hope of difference whether that image is the result of an intervention into a kindling meanings otherwise in short, random supply. flow, decided by impulse, or given out as an occurrence discovered, The still image grips some previously undefined instant that may while in fact it has been prearranged. The difference is manifested in often go nowhere, aesthetically, and may leave the social impact of the behavior of bodies and minds, interpreted by viewers. In either the picture uncertain and hard to explain. For the last twenty years or case, the street is still that zone rightly viewed as the site of where things so, street photography has been transformed by four environmental happen. If there ever appears any sour proclamation about the death conditions: media markets have dwindled; digital photography has of the street, it should be taken with a grain of sugar. In the end, street virtually replaced film; postmodernist scepticism toward documentary photography, as always, radiates a polymorphous openness to life. FOREWORD 77 1 Guy with Cactus (Lower East Side, Sunday 9:52 pm), Yasmine Chatila, New York, USA, 2008 1 INTRODUCTION More people than ever before reside in cities. According to a United played out on the pavements. Tokyoite Daido Moriyama (see p.348) Nations report in 2008, for the first time in human history over half muses, “For me cities are enormous bodies of people’s desires and of the global population is now urban; a figure that is set to rise to I search for my own desires within them, I slice into time, seeing 70 per cent by 2050. In both the developed and developing world, the the moment.” Other photographers are intent on extracting the city has either become or is fast becoming a fact of life. Cities have extraordinary from the ordinary. “You can walk 5th Avenue all day been hailed as the “greatest artifacts” made by humankind. and it’s never the same,” claims New Yorker Joel Meyerowitz (see Architectural critic Jonathan Glancey describes them as “zoolike, p.18). “You get a different selection of the animal life in that canyon forestlike places planted with trees and alive with animals.” The city’s and it never ceases to amaze.” The urban carnival draws artists for all ever-changing, energetic pace draws and entices us. Critic and writer manner of reasons. Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom surveys Susan Sontag views it as “a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” pedestrians as a quasi-anthropologist on a quest for evidence (see “Synonymous with movement, dynamic, and vitality, it is the place p.192). JH Engström’s series in Paris (see p.152) and Alisa Resnik’s in where nothing is permanent and everything is possible,” claims Berlin (see p.184) reflect a more personal, almost diaristic approach, curator Marcel Feil. “The city is a magnet to fortune hunters, the depicting encounters on the streets with both friends and strangers. underprivileged and ambitious.” It is also an irresistible lure to artists. For others the drive is perhaps to document ways of life beyond their The World Atlas of Street Photography showcases the work of 100 own; Danish photographer Trine Søndergaard trains her lens on established and emerging contemporary artists. From Brazil to Beijing, women working the red-light district of Copenhagen (see p.200), Sydney to Seoul, New York to Delhi, the book journeys across five whereas South African Pieter Hugo focuses on an unusual group of continents, to over fifty diverse and disparate cities, with the purpose Nigerian street performers in “The Hyena and Other Men” (see p.270). of searching out the world’s best urban photographic art. The list of The book also considers artists working with urban portraiture: artists is not comprehensive; instead it has been compiled to create people who effectively turn the streets into makeshift studios. The illuminating juxtapositions and to illustrate the range of ideas, work of Americans Katy Grannan (see p.64), Michael Itkoff (see p.390), approaches, and techniques that are being explored in current street and Dawoud Bey (see p.74), at home and abroad, creates an intriguing photography. The book reveals how artists across the globe are pushing, dynamic between what photographer and critic Max Kozloff calls “the pulling, and radically redefining the tradition of street photography roving spirit” of street photography and the “deliberate encounters” with the result that the practice is being taken into new realms. of portraiture. Elsewhere, artists introduce textual elements into The book looks at those who practice classic candid street portraiture, lending the usually mute photograph and its subject a photography: people interested in freezing the theater of life being voice. On the street corners of London, Gillian Wearing frames her INTRODUCTION 9