Strassenbilder

Strassenbilder – A major series by Swiss photographer Lukas Hoffmann, Strassenbilder goes against the grain of street photography. Working by camera, Hoffmann got as close as possible to his subjects, capturing them spontaneously, without precise framing, capturing fleeting postures, body fragments and gestures, sometimes dazzled by direct, brittle light, precisely underlining the textures of skin, hair and clothing, which extend beyond the frame. The image’s complex composition questions the temporalitý intrinsic to the photographic medium. This large-format book presents a small selection of images from a corpus of over 500, published here for the first time.

The album format – echoing the large-format negative of the view camera – underlines the dizzying feeling that grips the viewer as the series unfolds. The book is accompanied́ by an essay by art historian Anne Bertrand, who reveals the different prisms of Lukas Hoffmann’s work and contextualizes it in the history of contemporary photography.