Recording the world’s directness is a specificity of the photographic medium. During the 1930’s, in Spain, Henri Cartier-Bresson frames humans in front of a wall. But for him, only the decisive instant matters, no need to multiply images. Walker Evans, during the same period, develops a similar serial work in New York for Subway Portrait.
In 1956 in Tokyo, Nicolas Bouvier discovers a new street show, the one of life passing. On a slightly elevated sidewalk, a bare scene, radical even, where humans pass in front a concrete decrepit wall. The space looks like a theatre scene and the wall like a curtain where the beings are « turned into behaviours » says the writer. He is absolutely drawn to the subject, sells books to a librarian to buy expired films and shoots 74 instants in ten days.
A major moment for a man who confesses: « In Japan, I became a photographer out of despair ». His series is an innovative one, though it is little known and recognised in photography’s history. It also belongs to the zen aesthetic of wabi-sabi. It celebrates the harmony of imperfection in its most modest form and the natural wear caused by time’s passing. Five years later, in the same town, William Klein also realizes a frontal series on people passing, in a cleaner and more graphic way.
As early as in 1930, the street night walker Brassai shoots Paris’ walls’ graffiti. Le Roi Soleil is the emblematic image of this work.
Approaching the wall of Arakicho, Nicolas Bouvier discovers a graffiti. It seems aimed at him « Dumb. I took it personally: I must have passed here a hundred times without seeing it ».
It is probably during a trip to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1967, that « the eye which writes » sees an engraved face on a wall. A link (?) to Brassai’s Roi Soleil, we could distinguish the writer’s face towards the end of his life. Andre Breton thinks the graffiti is surrealist.