Martin Essl Le Bateau Ivre

 

With the recent emphasis on street photography found in volumes such as Matt Stuart’s Think Like a Street Photographer (Laurence King Publishing, 2021) and Reclaim the Street: Street Photography’s Moment, Matt Stuart with Stephen McLaren (Thames & Hudson, 2023), there seems to be a renewed awakening to the genre. If the countless YouTube videos about street photography and the fetish for Leica cameras are any indicator, it appears to be a thriving enterprise. Leica’s brand sponsorship and artists like Todd Hido, Ray Barbee, Ed Templeton, Nikki Six, Randall Blythe, and Leica Lenny Kravitz indicate a regrowth of interest in the genre and the cameras associated with its classic format. Of course, not all street photography is Leica photography, but the brand has become associated with the genre.

 

 

What has always kept me at bay with street photography is that I found it hard to see it outside single images. Missing in the annals of street photography are books that I found held their own as a cohesive body of work instead of a series of great pictures shoveled into two covers under one title. This makes a book or body of work less dominated by concept than a portfolio of images. Certain photographers present a case for books with rigor and are assembled with cohesion in mind. With Garry Winogrand, it is fair to see Public Relations, from 1969,  as an early book in which both the conceptual underpinning of the work and its form in a book make sense.

 

Regarding Lee Friedlander, I do not generally think of the artist as a street photographer, though he is drafted into that category often. His photographs go above and beyond the tropes found in most street photography. His books, such as The American Monument (1976), Photographs (1978), and Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania (1982), are presented as something intentional, and the books reflect an attempt to think from the feet but extend past the notion of street photography. For me, at least, the aesthetic of his images has as much to do with the tail end of modernist photography as they do with the street. Arguably, one could argue that Atget was also a street photographer, though the images reflect something different.

 

 

The question that arises now is what street photography is and how it comes to be defined in 2024. For this, I do not have a list of answers and in looking through Reclaim theStreets by Stuart and McLaren, I have to admit that the overall unifying theme reflects a geographic position to urbanity and cities, with iterations of what streets look like in various places determining inclusion. I will admit that it is often hard to see a grave amount of variation in work cataloged as contemporary street photography to an un-nuanced set of eyes such as mine. Some of this concerns the lenses and gear chosen that best suit the experience of shooting on foot and on the fly in cities. A particular type of light also conditions the response to look like a street photograph. Often, this light is relatively bright unless dipped in the brush of Saul Leiter, from which many contemporary street photographers seem to find (cough cough)… inspiration.

 

 

 

One contemporary artist I find valuable to this discussion is Jermaine Francis from England, whose work started with a series of self-published books that reflects a type of repetitive street photography that denies, in its flow, a concentration of singular photographs that look for impact or are driven by any event spectacle, concentrating instead on the ambiance of  London during and slightly on the finishing moments of the pandemic when the roads and proximity to other people were held in question when isolation was law and when we truly felt at odds with understanding the relative cohesion of social life.

 

His books remain a bulwark against the traditional “get the picture” type of street photography. Assembled in their aggregate, the photographs ask us to understand place slightly differently than many other books of street photography where style or decisive moments are given gravitas over the whole. This presents a straightforward solution to the photobook. It offers a chance to understand the work in a manner more relatable to cinema and movement. It forges a path in which the pictures are looked at through the form of the photobook and not the other way around. Francis gets the whole picture and has since used that genre as a stepping stone to speaking about more prominent, more significant topics such as race in post-industrial Britain, and ties them into the contemporary questions regarding the post-Brexit world.

 

 

Regarding Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat), the new book by an Austrian photographer living in Paris,  Martin Essl, published by Kehrer, I feel that there is something in line with Jermaine Francis’s thinking about the modalities associated with street photography. However, I am almost positive that both artists are in a moment of transition where their work will, in a short time, be considered less indebted to the genre than having an early interest in it as they move forward. Le Bateau Ivre is taken from an Arthur Rimbaud poem, which speaks to the very geography that Essl works with. Rimbaud, a fascinating persona from the 19th and early 20th Centuries, has been invoked into a contemporary discussion with Essl’s work, though outwardly, it does not follow the script of the poem, but instead uses it to conjure an idea of place, which suggests a shaping of interpretation of how the book could/should be related. I am pretty confident the title presents as shaping the tone of the work, but it is not directly credited to it.

 

I gravitated toward Martin’s book because I saw a series of images online that were curious enough for me to follow up on. The first part of the work that interested me from afar was the use of blue. There is an intentional use of the color; though it is not used expressively, it anchors most of the book. Some of this comes from several construction site barrier walls that the artist has photographed people and shadows wandering across. There is a grave amount of repetition with the blue cast on these walls that I find extremely interesting, given the expense of producing a book in which repetition is vital to the work. It is a thick book of images, a blue slab of sunny pictures from the City of Light. The overall feeling within the book is one of careful observation less than a salutation to street photography, although there are hints of that image-making at play.  The image of a diner tabletop in yellow with a mustard and ketchup bottle being blasted by the sun is one of these images, an image that I feel is a bit of a darling in the book as it does not uphold the rest of the images and its inclusion breaks us from the general ambiance when we approach it in the sequence. That is not to say it is not a good image; it is.

 

Essl’s book interests me because it feels very determined in the photobook medium. There is an intention to share the atmosphere of Paris that is further sculpted by the repetition the artist uses in the blue background and people moving in and out of frame. Instead of ONLY wandering, there is a static sense of being rooted in a single place to let the world walk in front of the camera instead of the chase usually associated with street photography, and this is a very dynamic shift in approach. This is why I only partially see the work as street photography, but perhaps a type of elevated form of that genre. As a fan of horror films, I realize that a genre or trope of an existing category is elevated and bears some twitching. But, I am at a loss for how else to describe the small cadre of photographers who seem to have their roots in street photography and who are pushing the genre to new, frankly more cerebral levels as anything less than elevated.

 

 

The overall feeling in Le Bateau Ivre is one of an obsession with observation and a connectedness to place. Perhaps this stems from Essl’s outsider-in background. Still, essentially, I assume it comes from his passion for photography and the city itself, a not-untold story when one thinks historically of Brassaï, Ed van der Elsken, Jane Evelyn Atwood, and Christer Strömholm, amongst many others who have left photographic love letters to Paris. With Essl, the concentration is on the moment and the repetition I have spoken of. The book is divided into parts, offers a slow burn and walk throughout the city, mostly in daylight, and features casual photographs of the city’s citizens. One point of heightened experience in the middle of the book is the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral. It is only a few frames, but it serves as a point of climax, with the city shrouded in smoke before it clears, and we move through the brighter second half of the book.

 

The emphasis on the burning of the cathedral is a marker of time more than destruction. It was an enormous event that was covered around the world. Yet, in Essl’s book, it is but one moment distributed at the center point, which speaks more about the general idea of place than the historical significance of the conflagration. Its position in the book is essential but not the central motif undergirding the sequence. It is simply an event on the continuum of Martin and his daily life in Paris. One might suspect that the construction mentioned above site walls that he photographs could be the walls walling off the cathedral during reconstruction, thus playing a slight trick on our perception of time while looking at his paper movie.

 

In summary, Le Bateau Ivre is refreshing when I consider its relationship to street or urban photography. There is an apparent intention in the sequencing of the book. Instead of a random set of pictures, the photographer has taken pains to outline the city’s ambiance through economically challenging (book production) insistence on repetition. The book was clearly expensive to produce in this manner, and one could argue that the repetition was over-emphasized. Still, it was necessary to elevate the atmosphere into something more enveloping and essential. It is a robust offering, and if you are interested in contemporary photography that reinvents the idea of previous tropes like street photography, this will be a perfect fit. I am very curious about what a subsequent book from Essl might look like or what he might do if it were only offered 80 pages. But those ideas will have to wait. I think this is one of the finer books of the year in a year full of fine books. I am pleasantly surprised to have my ideas of what street photography can be with its publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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