Peter Funch: The Photographer of Modern Life by Mette Sandbye

Peter Funch:  The Photographer of Modern Life

By Mette Sandbye

In this book Peter Funch (b. 1974) combines his two pioneering photography projects from his 13 years of living in New York, Babel Tales from 2006–2011 and 42nd and Vanderbilt, created between 2007 and 2016 and first published as a book in 2018. Babel Tales was only ever published as a limited-edition booklet and has not been compiled in an actual book until now.

Funch originally trained as a documentary photographer; he graduated from the Danish School of Journalism in 1999. As such, he has always been inspired by the reactive, attentive tradition of street photography. In the early 2000s, those yearsfollowing his graduation, more and more photographers started working with digital photography instead of analogue. For the majority of photographers, its great advantage was that it made the life and daily work of the photographer easier, avoiding the tiresome, time-consuming, and even, at times, health-threatening work in the darkroom. Few photographers at the time actually challenged the very language of and expression of photography via the emergent digital technology.Peter Funch was one of those few.

Funch’s idea, for a new kind of street photography in a new age, arrived after seeing the feature film Smoke, made in 1995 by Paul Auster and Wayne Wang. One of Smoke’s two leading characters is the Brooklyn tobacconist Auggie Wren, whoevery morning at 8am takes a photograph from the street corner diagonally opposite his shop. After developing the film, he places all these photos of the same site in albums, several different but very alike photos on every page, distinguished only by the date written underneath each image. Auggie’s idea is that all these photos are, at a superficial glance, all the same, but that a closer look reveals the uniqueness of each of the moments, as well as people, captured on camera. Funch wondered, inspired by Auggie’s practice, if he could create a street photography practice combining the instantaneity and the element of surveillance from the documentary tradition with an editing process inspired by fiction. Not unlike Auggie, he started placing himself at specific but different locations in New York City at specific moments of the day, randomly and intuitively photographing the events transpiring in front of the camera. Every day for many days in a row, Funch would stand in the same place and photograph random passersby. At home in front of his computer, he looked through the photographs for hours and started to discover and explore similar phenomena, people and actions, isolating individual figures and assembling them into new, fictitious images, so digitally seamless that at first glance you do not notice the manipulation. These are people smoking, talking on their cell phone, running, waiting, walking while reading or having coffee, walking the dog or the stroller: all markers of human relationships and incidences of modern city life. The project captures the anonymizing uniformity of the city, making you smile, reflect, and then simply drop your jaw in fascination that he was able to create these condensed collages out of thousands of photographs. 

The Next Step

Many years of extremely thorough shooting and editing resulted in the Babel Tales series, in which he combined a conceptual and almost anthropological preoccupation with the everyday practices and patterns of urban life with an—at the time—impressive mastery of the digital possibilities of photography and what felt like a radical renewal of the street photography tradition.

Considering how consistent and distinctive this project turned out to be, one might wonder how the artist could turn it into something new and different. He could, of course, wipe the slate clean and go in a completely new direction. Instead, Funch created—in an overlapping period with Babel Tales—a new project that was, in a way, the same working process,but completely different. The title 42nd and Vanderbilt is taken from the location where Funch spent countless hours over a period of nine years between 8:30 and 9:30 am: The corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt in New York. It is in front of Grand Central Station and a corner where thousands of people pass by on their way to and from the city’s famous train terminus during this busy morning hour. 

Where Babel Tales was digitally manipulated, 42nd and Vanderbilt consists of completely unmanipulated street photographs. The ‘manipulation’ consists of Funch sorting through his thousands of portraits of random passers-by, shot with a slight zoom and in the natural light from the glare of a glass surface of an adjacent building, and finding the same person in multiple shots over months and sometimes years. In itself, this is a monstrous task. Thousands of people may only appear once, but then there are suddenly some who turn out to be repeated over weeks, months, and years. He combined them in small sequences of two or three images where the same person appears, often dressed almost identically and in almost the same pose, or where a ‘secondary character’ in one image becomes the ‘main character’ in the following pair of images. Because of the zoom and the bright light, which looks like a flash but is the natural light of the street at that particular corner, the photographs take on the character of movie stills. The viewer begins to make sense of the ‘movie’ from just two photos of the same person taken months apart. Where Babel Tales captured the ‘type’, the uniformity of city life, here the focus is on the ‘man of the crowd,’ per Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous short story from 1840. They are the anonymous individual we want to get to know better, and whose story we invent ourselves. 

Photographing Modern Life

Poe’s title, The Man of the Crowd, also inspired the French author and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who translated the short story into French in 1845. “In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him,” Baudelaire describes Poe’s written ‘picture’, as he calls it, in his famous long article “The Painter of Modern Life” from 1863 (Baudelaire [1863] 1965, 7). Poe describes how the man at the window, not unlike Funch with his camera, categorizes the people he sees into different types. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire—inspired by Poe—attempts to narrow down what in his eyes makes an artist interesting, namely that they not only depict beauty and historical times but also focus on “manners of the present” (ibid., 1) as well as “the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time” (ibid., 2). According to Baudelaire, these aspects are missing in much art of his time, but he finds it in the—at that time—little known artist Constantin Guys’ drawings and watercolors, made with speed and therefore particularly capable of capturing modern life. Guys, the curious flâneur of modern life, the passionate spectator, is capable of seeing the world, as a child would, in a state of curiosity and newness. “The crowd is his element,” writes Baudelaire, and Guys depicts it and the various modern types belonging to it “as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life” (ibid., 9). With his pen, Guys catches all sorts of ‘modern’ types and people: women, courtesans and prostitutes, the dandy, the military man, children playing. He is a genius in depicting ‘modernity,’ writes Baudelaire, “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (ibid., 13). 

Baudelaire, the lover of modernity, fashion, city life, and the flâneur, is paradoxically known for not acknowledging the then-new medium of photography, particularly expressed in his 1859 essay The Modern Public and Photography. Nevertheless, his analysis of Constantin Guys as ‘the painter of modern life’ echoes strongly with the photographic work of Peter Funch. Baudelaire’s words on Guys could be used almost one-to-one to describe Funch’s work. 

Registration and Seriality

In both series, Funch situates himself at a given point and a given time of the day and then sees ‘what happens’. His act ofphotographing is intuitive, as is often the ‘classical’ working process of the documentary photographer, but of course, as Susan Sontag pointed out in the 1970s: “photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.” (Sontag 2008, 7)

It is his particular combination of a surveillance-like, impartial, objective registration and the seriality that Funch creates and enhances at home in front of his computer that makes his method stand out. However, he is—implicitly—also standing on the shoulders of an anti-subjective tradition within modern photography that combines typologies of modernity with seriality, particularly driven forth by German photographers and the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] from the 1920s onward. One might look to August Sander’s quite neutral portraits of all sorts of social classes and professions, rural as well as urban, photographed in 1920s Germany and first published in 1929 in the book Antlitz der Zeit [Face of the Time], or Albert Renger-Patzsch’s close-ups of plants and banal industrial details, photographed with the same cool objectivity, making them look beautifully alike and odd at the same time. His seminal book Die Welt ist Schön [The World is Beautiful] was published in 1928. Starting in the 1960s, Bernd and Hilla Becher took this tradition of objectivity to a new level in the way they combined neutral up-front registrations of industrial buildings such as water towers, furnaces, gas tanks and oil refineries in a conceptually founded seriality, thus typically mounting the same but slightly different motifs in grids of typically 9 to 15 photographs, naming them ‘anonymous sculptures’, Anonyme Skulpturen, per the title of a 1970 photo-book. They used a range of optics from 90mm wide-angle lenses to 600mm telephoto lenses to make similar subjects appear similarly sized despite not being able to always photograph from the same distance. This is pre-digital manipulation of the apparently objective registration process.

The Bechers captured a certain typology of modern industrial society and made it explicit through seriality. Funch’s modern typology focusses on urban people doing things—in the vein of Poe and Constantin Guys. Although he is not using surveillance technology or hiding his own presence in the urban surroundings, his photographs have a feeling of surveillance to them and take their place in a proud lineage. In the mid-1910s Paul Strand documented anonymous urban life via candid, up-front depictions of random passers-by in New York caught off guard with a hidden lens, making them appear types and individuals at the same time. Walker Evans’ famous 1939–1941 candid subway photos from New York, taken with a camera secretly hidden under his coat, depict the people who sat opposite him on the train. Much later, in the 1990s, Swiss photographer Beat Streuli made his famous telephoto-lens large-scale depictions of groups of people in various urban situations, often waiting at traffic lights, or one could mention Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s 1999 series Heads, catching more than 4000 different people at Times Square with a tripod camera. diCorcia got help from powerful strobe lights that caught the individual in the crowd in a unique way, creating a feeling of cinematic drama in each photograph of an unknown, anonymous person in the midst of the metropolis bustle. 

Individuality and Typology in the Metropolis

Peter Funch’s portraits of people balance individuality and typology with an analytical turn of mind through his specific and highly original use of seriality, through which he combines a cinematic feeling of fiction with a documentary slice-of-life realism. Where both series center and play on this balance, one could say that typology dominates Babel Tales, and individuality characterizes 42nd and Vanderbilt. 

Going back to early reflections and analysis of life and behavior in the modern metropolis, like Charles Baudelaire’s, the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s lecture from 1903, The Metropolis and Mental Life [Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben] represents a pioneering articulation of the implications of urban everyday life on humans. Here, Simmel argues that human psychology is completely changed in the then-emergent metropolis compared to rural life. In the metropolis, money and economic exchange are the driving forces which everyone works to obey. In a rural setting, you know everyone, and relations between people have been built up over a whole lifetime. The individual in the metropolis is constantly maneuvering among and being impacted by new impressions, new people, and by constant pace and diversity, implying an intensification of the nervous system. There is simply no time to feel and reflect on all these impressions, so in order to protect oneself, the urban person must develop some survival strategies, among them always being driven by time management and punctuality, because otherwise, the system will collapse into chaos, Simmel argues. Another strategy is to develop a ‘blasé’ attitude, a façade of disinterestedness, to survive the many impressions to which you simply cannot react every time they happen. Things, people, events thus often become devalued, and people relate to each other with reserve, indifference or even distrust, which paradoxically guarantees the individual a measure of inner personal integrity and freedom. At the same time, it becomes hard to assert your own personality, although people strive to do exactly that in order not to disappear completely in the anonymous crowd. Funch’s work pinpoints Simmel’s sociological analysis in an illustrative and at the same time highly original way.

In Babel Tales, he invisibly collages many photos taken at the same place into one image, thus creating a somewhat anthropological analysis of people, behavioral patterns and phenomena in the big city. He depicts how the speed and time control related to capitalism controls behavior, as Simmel argued: People are running or rushing to work in many of theimages. Time is ticking. Communication systems rule: People are looking into or talking on the cell phone; they are carrying yellow envelopes or case files. Then there are other kinds of typologies related to how people dress: Businessmen in remarkably similar grey suits; doctors in white coats, hurrying. Sometimes people simply appear with mundane human gestures or facial expressions: Yawning; scratching their forehead in some kind of distress or pondering;eyes closed, maybe just to try to remember who they are. Sometimes people try to assert their individuality by dressing up in a special color, like flashing red, only to discover that other people have chosen the very same strategy. Others are even more quirky or odd: People carrying large balloon samples; tourists who take strange bodily positions to photograph or to pose on Times Square; people who all observe something that we do not see. Many indeed appear blasé: They have a look of either indifferent introversion or outright distrust towards the camera, towards us, towards other people. It seems like the urban monster, the ‘Moloch’ of modernity, which both Fritz Lang named the big city in his famous silent film Metropolis from 1927 and which Allen Ginsberg repeated in his long poem Howl from 1956, is simply swallowing up people and all signs of emotions and individuality. 

The Poetry of Humanity

At first glance, then, all people in Funch’s collages seem alike. They are ‘types’, collected and presented on one surface. One could read parts of the work as a critical analysis of what late capitalism in the metropolis does to people, including all the images where workers, service people, even unemployed or poor people standing in line for a free supper appear. It is a dehumanizing grind. Guards on duty prevent confrontations and clashes in this urban ‘jungle’. 

However, it is also important to underline the beauty, the poetry and the humor in Funch’s universe, as well as what I would call a strong humanistic undercurrent, since viewing the work soon sees you plunging yourself into the enormous amount of details of difference in the large panoramic photographs. Funch never exoticizes the people in his photographs, but there are differences and many individual patterns of reaction. This woman carries her dog in a very specific way, full of tenderness. This man in a wheel chair has lost both his legs; how did that happen? He is included in the photo with the many balloons, so you only discover him after a while. The title of this image is not Balloons but Care Takers, and in this photo, you discover several situations of such care. Some suggest a socially unequal situation, for instance between a white child in a stroller and a black nanny, while others suggest a more equal constellation of simply human care. Is this flamboyant person in red a man or a woman? Some people are buying flowers to their beloveds, or eating an ice cream.Why is this bride dressed in white all alone in the street? A woman has stopped to look carefully at her phone with a concentrated look: has she just received a troubling text message? 

This element of stimulating a narrative desire in the viewer is what drives 42nd and Vanderbilt, where we construct an inner film through only two or three sequential photographs. Was she carrying a grief that she has now overcome and become happy? Perhaps she has a new boyfriend? The couple who appear to be fighting in the first photograph are still together and suddenly looks happier long after, or is it the other way round? Are they getting a divorce, or did they just have sex this morning? Is he lonely and friendless? Does she know her husband is cheating? Why does this old manalways look so grumpy—which twists of fate, disappointments and losses during his lifetime made him carry this mask of grumpiness for weeks, month, maybe years? Why is this guy always looking into the garbage can: is he poor, thrifty, or just avoiding waste? Is she always carrying dark sunglasses to protect herself from the sun, or from the gaze of other people? Most have not noticed the observing photographer, but a beautiful woman dressed in red suddenly surprises us with a questioning, confrontational look that says “what are you up to?”

Where Philip-Lorca diCorcia used a specific artificial light to encircle his ‘main character’, Funch’s light is natural but cleverly selected regardless. When people step into the glowing light at this specific corner at this specific time of the day, some of them appear with a mysterious, ahistorical beauty, as if in an old painting. Hereby the photographer catches the possible beauty in all of us.

Peter Funch makes us see and realize the energy of the metropolis, what moves people, what affects them, what distracts them, which psychological states they are in, what they wear, how they behave and carry themselves, and how they are—in fact—individuals. This project is very accessible, which is not meant as a criticism; quite the contrary. They are beautiful color photographs that attract the eye and allow it to explore the details, while at the same time reflecting on longings, dreams, loneliness, anxieties, marvels, relations, time, and existence. On what it means to be human. For many, photography’s ties to reality, to the subject in front of the camera, is a burden. Not for Peter Funch. These depictions of ‘the man of the crowd’ are coolly registering and at the same time very moving in a way that articulates the good that photography can do when used by a photographer who can both see and reflect.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” [1863] in Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne. Phaidon Press Ltd, 1965.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” [1903] in K. H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: The Free Press, 1950.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 2008.