Tate Modern’s Street & Studio is a blind alley

But in what meaningful way is Sternfeld doing something different from zillions of photographers who see something interesting in the street and snap it?

A sensible visitor is advised, therefore, to ignore the show’s stated purpose entirely and wander about looking at things that catch their fancy. Of which there will be many. In 1917, Alvin Langdon Coburn shot the American poet and fascist sympathiser Ezra Pound in a startling set of "vorticist" portraits that reduce Pound’s likeness to a hard black profile set in a grid of dark shadows, some of which - and this could be my imagination - seem to form a scary preemptive

swastika on the wall. A few images later, Paul Strand looks down on Wall Street in 1915, and notices the way the shadows of the rushing crowd cut dynamically across the blocky squares of modern architecture.


Read More