Thomas Struth
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.

Pergamon Museum 2, 2001

The series Struth carried out in public museums is one of the most highly praised and recognized. The systematic approach to the image capture, the repetition of the subject and the exploration of different exhibition spaces make this project a faithful homage to the teachings of the Bechers, thus establishing parallelisms with some of his classmates.
As opposed to his black-and-white work on the streets, empty, ghostly, often unreal due to its coldness, in these museum rooms we see many colourful people. Groups looking at paintings, the sculptures, the archaeological remains. People who gesticulate, comment, standing back and getting close, following the choreography proper to museums. Struth’s fascination with these inhabited places, in which he photographs things happening, conveys his interest in establishing a relationship between photography, psychology and sociology.
It was in Naples, while he was photographing a group of restorers working on Saint Laurence Church, when he realized how interesting it was to photograph a group of people in front of paintings representing other people. Thus resorting to a classic resource in art history, that of the picture within a picture, employed by Velázquez and David Teniers, Struth explored this world of relations between the spectator and works of art in several museums.
He has carried out this experiment in museum spaces as well as much visited churches, such as the cathedral of Milan or the Monreale church in Palermo. His series (Musée du Louvre I-IV) was born during a visit to the Louvre in Paris in 1989, where he singled out a group of Japanese tourists contemplating Gericault’s Le radeau de la Méduse with enthusiasm. But what could have been a snapshot became an in situ representation of the diagonals of the painting on the part of the spectators. Among the various series, most outstanding are The Art Institute of Chicago I-II (1990), Stanze di Raffaello I-II (1990), and also those produced at l’Accademia de Vencia, before Tiziano paintings, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the most recent one carried out in 2001 in the Pergamon Museum of Berlin.
Regarding this series of enormous photographs of one of the museums that receives most visitors due to its impressive archaeological patrimony, Struth has commented, “I am seeking a dialogue between past and present and the possibility of finding a quiet space in our frenetic world”. An encounter between classic and modern, a place to consider the historical value of the roots shaping our identity. That atmosphere of calmness lends it a simple yet intelligent choreography, directed by Struth, in which the spectators occupy the museum spaces like obedient actors who, with “silent theatricality” fill the empty places in the scene. The dimensions of the photographs -normally, in all the series, the copies are produced in the same scale as the works appearing in them- which, in the case of the Pergamon Museum, follow in the wake of the immensity of the ruins of the altar dedicated to Zeus, another influential factor regarding its being perceived as an unquestionable classic. C. D.

Piazza San Ignacio I, II y III, Roma, 1990

Among the many journeys Thomas Struth has taken in search of the trace of the essence of cities, he has been to Rome and other Italian cities on various occasions. He recognizes the fascination he feels as a German tourist before such historical wealth and the splendour of Italian architecture, and he employs his camera to capture the most theatrical nooks and crannies of these cities, such as that balcony that appears to be a theatre box in Campo de Fiori, Roma (1984). However, his works are evidently documentary in nature, as they also seek common places such as apartment buildings (Via Monte Cardonet, Roma, 1988), and he comes to the conclusion that although the building is different from those in Germany, the idea it conveys is the same; people transform it, adding antennas, hanging clothes out to dry… To him, photographing a city is much like photographing a person, it reveals character and personality.
In order to produce this series of three photographs about the Piazza de San Ignazio in Rome, Thomas Struth himself confesses that he had difficulties. He had been wanting to photograph this square for some time, but he could never find the moment when there were no cars spoiling the field of vision. “Every time I was in Rome, I went there to verify the situation, and one Sunday morning when there was one car only, I said to myself, today is the right day. I was trying to compose the picture so as not to include the car when the owner arrived, got in and left, leaving me the ideal situation in which to shoot the photo”.
The Piazza de San Ignazio is one of Rome’s most visited and one of the most representative of XVIII century Roman architecture. The church by the same name is located there and it houses father Pozzo’s famous friezes, which display the illusionist formulations of Italian baroque painting. The rationalization of the space continues in this small enclosed square, in keeping with the tastes of the architects of the time, for upon entering it, the beholder is astounded by the monumental scale of the architecture; a sudden and absolutely theatrical effect.
These photographs were taken from the stairway of the above-mentioned church, whose façade is no longer the centre of attention, this being diverted onto the buildings opposite it. These old residential buildings are the protagonists of an optical trick, since they become one single building if looked at from the central axis of the church façade. Curiously, Struth did not capture this aspect with his camera, which would have been expected had he taken the picture from the centred point of view he has used so often in earlier photographs.
Over time, Struth has modified the perspectives and compositions of his photos, making them more flexible and varied, something that has not occurred with the lighting he chooses for photographing cities, which is very neutral, homogeneous, and reminiscent of the skies of Northern Europe, an indication of his training and his roots. C. D.