Both William Klein and Daido Moriyama explore the modern condition of the city through their photography. Klein’s seminal work on New York and later Tokyo inspired a generation of street photographers, while Moriyama’s photographs offer a surreal take on the urban condition.
In this tour of the current exhibition, photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg explores the construction of public space in the photographs of Klein and Moriyama, their connection to the street, and how both artists are using photography to explore the radical potential of shared urban presence within the city.
Luxemburg works with photography to investigate the significance of the modern project on the city. Her large-scale photographic works expand the concept of the ‘commonsensual’ in relation to urban public space and representation. In her photographic work she brings to light the overlooked, the dismissed and the unforeseen, creating immersive and vertiginous compositions that challenge prevailing representations of the city.
Her work has been gathered in the monograph Commonsensual (Black Dog Publishing, London) which also presents her collaborative forays into opera Liebeslied/My Suicides with the philosopher Alexander Garcia Düttmann. Luxemburg’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Royal Academy, London; and LABoral, Gijón, Spain. She teaches and researches on the photography programme at the Royal College of Art, London.
