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Trajectory

Geldern (Germany), 1954

His artistic beginnings were devoted to drawing and painting, with which he was fond from a young age and which led him to enroll in the Künstakademie of Düsseldorf to study with Gerhard Richter. But the realism of his drawings caused him to start using a camera, for he came to the conclusion that photography was unique in trapping time and atmosphere. This is when he decided to head in a different direction and transferred into Bernd and Hilla Becher's course, a course taken by other important contemporary German photographers.

Their teaching method was based on photographing a subject repeatedly and constantly. Therefore, following the instructions of his masters, Struth began to photograph the streets of his city systematically for several years. Although there is no room for sentimentalism in his work, the psychological and social undertones in these photographs ought not be ignored. He is conscious of the importance of the buildings around us and the streets we pass by, since they are a faithful reflection of the mentality of our society and the moment we are living.

In the late seventies, he travelled to New York for the first time thanks to a scholarship. There, in addition to working intensely on the city, he got to know the photographs of August Sander, Walker Evans, Stephan Shore, etc. When he returned to Germany, he continued photographing cities, always in black-and-white, and he began to travel in order to photograph England, France and Italy.

Due to a project carried out with the psychoanalyst Ingo Hartman during the mid eighties, Struth began to explore the genre of the family portrait, inaugurating a fruitful series with a photograph of the Shimada family in the garden of their home. This permitted him to study the behaviour of the family members when photographed, and draw very interesting sociological and psychological conclusions about group behaviour, which he expanded upon in later series in which the protagonists are the visitors at museums and churches. These are Struth's most well known works, and he has added to them on several occasions throughout his career. The first series was taken in the Louvre in 1989 and the last took place in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in 2001.

Another of Struth's projects that conveys his interest in the relation between photography and psychology is that carried out in a Swiss hospital. For each sick person's room, he made photographs of the surrounding countryside and of flowers, so that they would serve the patients as discreet metaphors of their homes. All this material was published in 2001 in the book Dandelion Room.

In his most recent series New Pictures from Paradise (2002) Struth traded the grey labyrinths of deserted cities captured with a rigid frontal point of view for the disorder of the exuberant greenery of rain forests throughout the world, from Brazil to Australia. C. D.