Strassenbilder

A major series by Swiss photographer Lukas Hoffmann, Strassenbilder takes the opposite approach to street photography. Working in camera, Hoffmann gets as close as possible to his subjects to capture them spontaneously, without precise framing, capturing fleeting postures, fragments of bodies and gestures, sometimes dazzled by direct, brittle light, precisely highlighting the textures of skin, hair and clothing, which spill out of the frame. The complex composition of the image questions the temporalitý intrinsic to the photographic medium. This large-format book presents a narrow selection of images, from a corpus of over 500, published here for the first time.

The album format – which echoes 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 contextualises it in the history of contemporary photography.