In a commonly used biological metaphor, the streets of a city are referred to as its arteries, indicating that the lifeblood of an urban formation courses through these passages. Cultural signals, social performances, economic transactions and political struggles are enacted within the space of the street on a daily basis and in a myriad forms. From this welter of activity an image of the city emerges.  Even as this image appears to focus and solidify it is imperceptibly, continually transformed by the events of each passing moment. Like the streets that give it shape and definition, this urban formation wherein we seek meaning is never still. Forever elusive, its only constant is change.

So how and where does one look for meaning on a street?

In bits and pieces, fragments, disjunctures and juxtapositions. In the streets that join and divide the places of the city, the transitions between then and now, in the memory of what was and the experience of what is, in the collision between wealth and poverty. In such places meaning resides — always fragmentary, paradoxical, resonating in multiple ways. 

Most perspectives on the city, whether that of a scholar, a poet or an artist, are constrained by a singular lens or methodological approach making meaning that mirrors the seeker rather than the place. The alternative, a wide angle, multi-disciplinary perspective attempting to encompass the simultaneity of multiple histories, memories and events is too elusive, scattered and chaotic, too close to the object of study itself.

Yet there are some extraordinary precedents for this alternative, fuzzy approach to theorizing and visualizing the life of city streets. In the mid-nineteenth century the French art-critic and poet Charles Baudelaire urged his peers to seek inspiration from their urban environment by becoming flaneurs, or idle strollers, suggesting that this tactic would provide access to the secrets of the city in the only way possible, in brief glimpses and fleeting impressions. 

For the last thirteen years of his life, during an intensely oppressive context of fascism in Europe between the two World Wars, Walter Benjamin was a flaneur in the streets of Paris compiling his insights of the urban environment, its surfaces and depths, in over thousand pages of notes. This unfinished work by Benjamin, referred to as the “Arcades Project” can be read as a testament to the enduring, subversive power of the culture of the streets, the apparently inconsequential moments of everyday life that flicker past like the moving images of cinema.

Following the revolutionary upheavals in France in 1968, Michel De Certeau wrote The Practice of Everyday Life, a poetic, theoretically dense and rigorous scholarly thesis on the ephemera of urban spaces. De Certeau showed how the commonplace activities of ordinary people infuse city streets with a vital and complex cultural dimension.

In the early 1980s M.F. Husain, shot a photographic series titled, Culture of the Streets that focused on the plethora of cinematic imagery pervading the urban environment in India. Husain was a pioneer among the artistic and scholarly elite in India to turn his gaze upon the urban street finding in it beauty, depth and richness. The artist chose to locate his photographs in Chennai (Madras) as this city surpassed all others, including Mumbai (Bombay), for the quantity, quality and scale of its cinema advertisements. In Husain’s photographs the humans and their cinematic backdrops create a marvelous symphony of harmony and dissonance.

Although he is known primarily as a painter, Husain chose to represent the city streets in the medium of straight color photography that, in comparison with painting or other photographic techniques, limits the artist’s ability to manipulate the final image. This choice of medium implied that the ‘culture’ that was portrayed was visually complex and powerful enough to stand on its own without requiring additional artistic interpretation. In this work Husain integrated anthropological and artistic meanings of the term ‘culture’ as both the social life and everyday rituals of a people, and as the artistic, literary and philosophical achievements of a society. Husain’s photographs drew attention to the fact that the activity and apparel of ordinary people on the streets as well as the cinema advertisements that enframed them was a legitimate and vibrant dimension of Indian culture.

Now there are many within the artistic community in India who focus on the semiotic clatter of city streets. Their works feature, among other sights, teashops with their steaming pots, greasy vendors, plastic furniture and walls of brightly patterned ceramic tiles; jostling crowds in railway stations; coded shop signs in Indian English; the uninhibited mix of Indian and Western styles of clothing. A new iconography of Indian art emerges in their works.

It is this everyday, encompassing, ephemeral dimension of the public sphere that is the pivot of contemporary visual culture in India.