Visual Arts

Desolate streets and densely populated museum-like interior spaces, family and individual portraits, from the close-up of a single bloom to the blankets of uncultivated foliage in untouched forests: as diverse as Thomas Struth’s themes might seem, the uniformity lies in the consistency of showing what is there. No more and no less.

From Düsseldorf ...

Every few years, Thomas Struth lets slip in an interview that he is thinking that it would be nice to paint something again. To paint like he used to when he was still studying in Gerhard Richter’s class in Düsseldorf. But straight after that the same question would crop up that ultimately led him to photography: what should I paint? It quickly became clear even to Struth as a student of fine arts that he was less concerned with the process of painting than with the construction of a picture or the propagation potential of a theme. The perspective of a student exhibition back in 1976 showed black and white photographs of 49 Düsseldorf streets and women’s heads in the train – Gerhard Richter must have had no choice but to advise his student to continue his training in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s class. The rest is art history now, seeing as Thomas Struth – together with Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer – belongs to the first and most famous generation of the Becher School. Despite the diversity of the approaches, they have in common their documentary character, which is often in thematic sequels of connected works.

... to everywhere

Unbewusste Orte (Unconscious Places) was what the artist, who was born in 1954, called his first group of works, which was probably partly based on Anonyme Skulpturen (Anonymous Sculptures), a typology of technical constructions that was published in book form in 1970 by the Bechers. Whether they are taken in Düsseldorf, New York, Rome, Tokyo or Charleroi, the photographs always follow the same rules, they are always taken from a central perspective, always empty of people as far as possible, they show local peculiarities but not everyday life. They are – as is typical of all Struth’s works – without any sentiment at all, without exaggeration, far removed from any theatricality and completely free from critical oblique glances. The atmosphere of these localities, Struth once mentioned, is the selection criterion as to why he reacts to that particular place – a question that has to be answered every time.

Similar is true for the family and individual portraits, the collections that Struth tackled next. Although the people were always photographed in their private environments, it is not about exposing their private affairs. The people Struth photographs all come from his personal sphere, they are familiar to him. They are allowed to decide for themselves about body positions and group arrangements, which lends the recorded situation something pleasantly informal, just like looking in the mirror. The observer also embarks on a search for clues, social contexts, imperceptible gestures or indications of prosaicness. Like the tranquil unconscious places, all the portrait subjects seem to be at peace with themselves as well.

Even in the museum pictures, which show people visiting canonical works of art history, groups of tourists – who if anything are otherwise perceived as being too numerous and irritating – become single individuals again who are absorbed in looking at pictures whilst they in turn are looked at by the observer.

From the hospital to a paradise with no way out

In Struth’s architectural and city images, portraits and group portraits, still lives and landscape photographs you can say that the image structure and language is nothing short of old master quality as well. In the landscapes there is always a path leading past gardens, fields or woods into the distance, in the case of the flowers it is always a single bloom photographed in close-up revealing its vulnerability. These works were created between 1991 and 1993 for the sick room of a nursing home in the Swiss town of Winterthur. Two each of these unmatched pairs were hung in the rooms, in the form of an installation as it were, so that the patient has a view of the landscape from the bed, the visitor on the other hand does not just have the sick or recovering person in his field of vision, he can also see the close-up of a delicate flower.

For the last of his major collections of works, Thomas Struth visited the thicket of untouched forests and overgrown jungles around the world. These images of paradise show no horizon, no path, they do not even allow you to see a piece of sky. In this case, paradise is all-encompassing greenery with no way out.

Since his initial efforts in the seventies, Thomas Struth has photographed almost all parts of the world for his multi-faceted collections. Appropriately enough, the results have been displayed internationally, and they have been discussed and commented on in catalogue and newspaper texts over the last three decades. After all the large-format luxury editions, Hans Rudolf Reust and James Lingwood have now brought out a reader with texts by 23 authors on Struth’s work, published by Schirmer/Mosel, in which they understand how to put across the artist’s plurality.

In the contribution from Ingo Hartmann, the psychologist and psychoanalyst who died in 2003, you find out more about the character of Thomas Struth – the “bridge builder” as he calls him – and get an idea of what it is that holds his work together: “If I were to describe in detail how each individual picture came into being,” says Hartmann, “the extent to which the artist’s life and personality has been dedicated to each individual photograph would become clear – in a rational, emotional and social sense.”