Henry Bond – The Cult of the Street
Henry Bond, born in London in 1966 and trained at the Surrey Institute of Arts and Design and at Goldsmiths College in London, has produced a remarkable contemporary project with The Cult of the Street – Photographs of London. “The social net we live within is better-off, is one in which fashion and style play a role in all our activities … My central theme here is the striving for ever more and the people who live for their lifestyle. It turns on that idealisation of the status of the 80’s, now adapted to the society of the 90’s…”
Henry Bond lets himself be driven through the streets by the hectic of London, into the bustle of department stores, clothes and shoe shops, night-clubs and dance floors. In the process he assumes the gesture of street photography in images of the rhythm of the city, the gesture of advertising photography for shop-window displays and people trying on clothes, the gesture of Brassaï or Bill Brandt in his photographs taken at night or in the relentlessness of a surveillance camera at the exits from temples of consumerism. Urban culture, seen through the lens of all the photographic set pieces, genres and conventions of the past decades. A project on the subject of consumption, fitness and amusements which the pleasure society is drowning in, and at the same time a photographic work on our view of this society, on life becoming a media event, on its metamorphosing into a myth through photography.
The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.