Dreaming the Street

In this new collection, the internationally exhibited and award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, David Lurie, returns to the terrain of the city, but this time with a specific visual agenda in mind. He shapes this with the eye for a carefully composed frame of both a documentarist and a fine artist. Dreaming the Street strikes at the very heart of the dilemma of unequal access to the technological means of production—the digital sphere, usually reached via the ubiquitous smartphone.

With his aesthetic eye, skilful sense of composition, lighting, and colour and, most importantly, a keen sense of the topicality and socio-political importance of what is contained within his frames, in his new project, Lurie visually dramatizes the explosion of cheap and available camera technology built into smartphones. This has coincided with a corresponding explosion of the platforms on which their images can be seen—social media. This seemingly extreme democratisation of image making in fact also disempowers, by turning the data inherent in all images—locations, faces, frequency of images, likes and dislikes—into monetisable information to be harvested and deployed by social media corporations.

Street photography started out as a means to document and thereby understand new ways of living that rapid urbanisation and industrial work and leisure practices had brought about. As a medium, street photography focused on popular culture and the working classes as a result. The novelty of having one's lifestyle and values disseminated photographically is a mainstay of the street photography idiom—one that is now overshadowed by the ubiquity of its post-capitalist, self-initiated forms. This very ubiquity conceals the ideology behind a variable and radically unequal access to digital culture, still very much organised along class and racial lines.