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Boulevard.
Photographs by Adam Bartos. Essay by Geoff Dyer.
Steidl / Dangin,
Gottingen,
2006.
120 pp., 59 color illustrations, 11¾x9¾".
Signed copies available!
Essayist Geoff Dyer attempts to assay Adam Bartos’s
resolutely mute photographs of street scenes in Los
Angeles and Paris by referring to descriptive “antinomies”
distinguishing the two cities—walking versus driving,
ancient versus modern, compact and dense versus
sprawling and diffuse. He also mentions that for those
who travel extensively, “everywhere seems to look like
everywhere else.” But what is striking about these photographs,
and this book, is that Bartos has found a way
to strip the scenic out
of both of these
nominally picturesque
places, and out
of his photography,
which has in the past
demonstrated a keen,
subtle sense of visual
intrigue. Boulevard is
a triumph of diffidence,
a tour de force of the blasé, a proclamation that
ungainly pictures of unspectacular landscapes can be
made in nearly any city one chooses. There’s a kind of
virtuosity in this anti-decisive street photography, perhaps
even a sly denial of Baudelaire’s sensation-seeking
boulevardier in Les Fleurs du Mal—there’s nothing to be
found in these streets, my friend; best take your roguish
energy elsewhere. Of the 59 photographs reproduced in
the book, five appear to show private spaces, areas one
can’t access by car or standing on a public right-of-way,
and this startling incongruity brings the book’s motivations,
including its unexplained pairing of the two cities,
into even sharper focus. The presence of a bleached
blonde strolling a Paris sidewalk in fire-engine red boots
on the cover is clearly an ironic representation of
Boulevard’ s contents, for the parked cars visible in the
photographs far outnumber the pedestrians, even in
these two remarkably populous cities. It’s puzzling, and
impressive in its way. GEORGE SLADE
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