Thomas Struth,

Shinju-ku,
Tokyo, 1986,
black-andwhite
photograph, 33
x 26 3/4".

The center is black as a solar eclipse, the yellow petals surrounding it form a dazzling
corona. There is something ecstatic about sunflowers. At times they look like
heavenly bodies, flaming suns radiating a cosmic glow. Thats how theyre depicted in
a series of photographs from the early 90s by German artist Thomas Struth: closeups of single blooms, groups of fiery blossoms against a deep blue sky, a paradise
landscape of tall stalks with golden heads that eagerly follow the light. I could hardly
imagine a more welcoming vision than Garden on the Lindberg with Sunflowers, no.
1, Winterthur, 1992, presented in Struths 2001 book Dandelion Room: a small path
leading through a garden of sun-bathed flowers and into the calm shade of the
woods.
Confronted by an image like this, I feel tempted to parrot critic and Struth enthusiast
Peter Schjeldahl: "When I am looking at it, it strikes me as the best picture in the
world."
STRUTH BELONGS TO a small but highly influential group of artistsincluding
Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hfer, and Axel Httewho emerged some
twenty years ago from the Dsseldorf Kunstakademie and radically altered our
perception of the photographic image. (But what may appear from the outside to be a
tight clique of artists working along similar lines is in factor so Struth maintainsa
heterogeneous group who may share the same background and similar intellectual
coordinates but who stopped comparing notes years, even decades, ago.) In a
German art world dominated by painters, this generations large-scale photographs,
made possible by new printing techniques, mounted an unexpected challenge to the
oldest art when they first appeared in the 1980s. By now we are used to these
enormous color images of landscapes, architecture, cities, and peopleindeed we
have come to expect them on the walls of the same galleries we used to visit to see
paint on canvas. Still, one shouldnt forget that this is a relatively recent development.

Thomas Struth, Milan Cathedral

(facade), Milan, 1998, color
photograph, 69 x 87 1/4".

Today, Struth, Ruff, and Gursky are all world-renowned artists, and all of them have
exhibited in major museums around the globe. Last year Gursky was honored with a

midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now its Struths moment
in the sun: On May 12 an exhibition of some ninety photographs dating from 1977 to
the present opens at the Dallas Museum of Art; it then embarks on a year-long, threecity tour (including a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Asked
about the possible impact of this major retrospective, curator Charles Wylie says,
"Both the artist and I are very curious, since a survey of his work on this scale has
never been attempted before. That people will have a chance to view the full range of
Struths oeuvre will no doubt lead to a different perception of his production in its
entirety." And while Struths work is too widely known for there to be any major
surprises here, Wylie notes that there are nonetheless "a number of real sleepers in
the show, like the small landscapes from Switzerland, which hardly anyone has seen,
and a number of recent images of contemporary urbanity that open up new issues."
Asked about the retrospective, Struth emphasizes the possibility of creating revealing
juxtapositions of works belonging to different series, and also of producing a sense of
coherence. "For me its a lot about integration," he says. "For many years the sheep
have been running in different directions. Now Ill have a chance to herd the flock
together."
NO ONE WOULD DENY Struths knack for producing extraordinarily beautiful
images; in fact, its his ability to craft photographs at once formally precise and
visually riveting that has won him the recognition he enjoys. And yet, now that digital
technology has opened up what art historian Thomas Crow refers to as the "occult
potential" of photographic representation, and artists such as Gursky and Jeff Wall
produce complicated scenarios montaged out of a multiplicity of shots, thus loosening
the indexical link between picture and reality, a photo such as Garden on the
Lindbergor for that matter any of Struths recent landscapesmay seem
astonishingly conventional.
The flower photographs belong to a body of work commissioned by a Swiss hospital
to decorate patients rooms, but Struth doesnt hesitate to show this work in other
contexts, and the Swiss landscapes opened up a new series of images involving farflung natural environments. So what could possibly be the real aim, the artistic raison
dtre, of these landscapes and floral explosions? Surely a seemingly benign
affirmation of natures beauty cant be the sole motive; considering the rigor and
consistency of the artists previous work, its only natural to look for theoretical
underpinnings. One thing is clear: Struth traveled quite farliterally and
figurativelybefore arriving at the idyllic rural vistas in Winterthur. The route has
taken him from the industrial setting of the Ruhr valley to the most urbanized regions
of France, the United States, China, Japan, and back again. Still, there is a structural
consistency to the projects that makes it quite clear that the same photographer is
responsible for the colorful image of the small path disappearing into the Swiss fairytale forest no less than the 1979 black-and-white photograph of the deserted
Dsselstrasse in the artists hometown.
My gaze travels diagonally through Struths photographs of urban landscapes and
building complexes. A multiplicity of trajectories seems built into each image. Often
there is a primary object, centrally located and of obvious importance, but it offers no
stability for the eye. Instead the gaze slides along the streets, through the muddle of
thick black cables in a Japanese city (Shinju-ku, Toyko, 1986), through the
complicated cell structure of buildings on a hill in Naples (Vico dei Monti, Naples,
1988), or along the smooth facades of Chicago office towers (Lake Street [The Loop],
Chicago, 1990). The frontal view typical of German photographers Bernd and Hilla
Bechers archaeology of anonymous industrial architecture is thus substituted for an
oblique perspective: You are hardly ever allowed a direct view of a building, let alone
a peek inside through a window. Your eyes are not given a moments rest.
Struth, one of Bernd Bechers very first students at the Dsseldorf academy (he
graduated in 1980), is an artist of great persistence. The number of projects he has
worked on over the last twenty-five years can still be counted on one hand, and most
of them have yet to reach a definite conclusion. The first mature effort considered
worthy of public viewing was a series of black-and-white photographs of streets in
Dsseldorf, New York, Munich, and a handful of other cities, taken from the middle of
the road, the camera placed horizontally at about eye level. In the 80s Struth also
began making portraits, mostly of friends and their families, sometimes in black and
white, sometimes in color. Two new categories of imagesflowers and
landscapeswere added to the repertoire in the early 90s. Additionally, Struth has
assembled a large group of photosperhaps his best-known seriesshowing people
looking at art in museums; and finally, beginning in 1998, an ongoing exploration of
jungles and forests which he has titled "Paradise." These categories more or less
comprise Struths output in its entirety (with a few exceptions, like his recent
experiments with video, including a collaboration with German video artist Klaus von
Bruch).

Thomas Struth, Garden on the Lindberg with Sunflowers,

no. 1, Winterthur, 1992, color photograph, 54 3/8 x 68".

One of the most obvious traits of Struths early urban photographs is the utter absence
of people in the streets. These are not images of city lifepeople working, doing
business, communicating, interacting, playingbut a strict documentation of urban
space, of the architectural and societal conditions of human life in different parts of the
world. Struths project must be seen as part of a tradition evolving not only from the
Bechers, his immediate predecessors and teachers, but from such historical figures as
Eugne Atget and August Sander. In a famous commentary, Walter Benjamin wrote,
"Of Atget . . . quite justly it has been said . . . that he photographed [those streets] like
scenes of a crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the
purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence
for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance." Occasionally
one gets a glimpse of a human being in Struths urban archive, but these people play
no crucial role. Undeniably they are there, next to some parked cars in Shinju-ku,
Tokyo, or on the sidewalk along an avenue in Manhattan, but they are not the real
subject of the investigation. So what is the subject of these crystalline images? What
historical processesand what crimesare they evidence of?
When looking at these black-and-white streetscapes I get a strong sense that the
world depicted has already disappeared. One can, of course, still find streets like this
in Dsseldorf or any other large European city, but the temporal modality that the
photographs convey is decidedly not that of presence. As Benjamin Buchloh has
suggested, one could see these images as an archive of a "globally disappearing
world of the realin this case, the reality of inhabited and experienced social space
and its public architectural structures." In an era when the obtrusive spaces of
electronic communication and media technology challenge our old ideas of a public
sphere, pictures of urban architecture in the old-fashioned sense cannot but appear as
a collection of bleak afterimages of a past that, as Buchloh put it, "was still animated
by utopian aspirations toward public experience, social interaction, and a sense of
spatial and temporal reality."
The strict setup of Struths early urban photographs makes one aware not only of the
laws of perspective but also of the very fact that these pictures are photographs
produced by an optical machine rather than unmediated representations of some
subjective experience of lived space. The cold geometric objectivity of these images
makes it clear that they are not fragments of an ongoing experience of human social
interaction and exchange but by their very nature more "objective" than human
experience could ever be. After all, lived experience is embodied experience. The
camera lens may be thought of as an "eye," but without a natural link to the kinesthetic
sensations of a living body it has little to do with the experience we know as human.
That is at least partly the explanation of the estrangement these images produce: They
depict cities I know yet have never seen like this (being equipped with two eyes
embedded in flesh and blood, I never could). This inhuman element is, of course,
inherent in the medium and must inform any photograph of a city, but the strict
emphasis on central perspective has led some to call Struths practice a "photography
of photography"in other words, his pictures make their own conditions of possibility
visible. The central perspective of the urban photographs can perhaps also be seen as
a literalization of the first-person-singular position of the ocularcentric "eye/I" of postCartesian epistemology. Given such a point of departure, at issue would no longer be
the mourning of the public spheres disappearance but an even more fundamental
question: How is society possible? Or phrased phenomenologically, How can we ever
experience a shared world? Radically dehumanized, these images do not grant the
possibility of human interaction. What we get is a skeletal frame of being together
(architecturally), but no subjects really inhabit the structure.
In Struths second large project, his portraits of individuals, couples, and families, on
the other hand, we certainly encounter subjectivity, but these human beings are
always depicted in a private sphere and are never shown interacting as productive
members of a community. The only group in view is the family. Society remains a
mystery. And so, to a large extent, does subjectivity, because these portraits make no
pretense that the people depicted are ultimately knowable. They remain interesting
strangersinteresting because they convey an inner life that will never be fully
grasped by looking at their image. In that sense Struth is a respectful photographer; he
never attempts to make the private feelings, dreams, or thoughts of the other a part of
his pictures. He manages nonetheless to seize moments of expressiveness, when his

sitters appear full of life and every square millimeter of their faces seems to carry
significance. The 1987 portrait of Eleonor Robertson, say, or the 1989 portrait of Claire
Chevrierboth black-and-white and very straightforward frontal shots of women, one
young, one elderlyoffers very little information about the sitters. The backdrops are
generic: a white wall, patterned wallpaper. And yet both women come across as
unquestionably intelligent and sophisticated. Theyre people I would like to know.
The individuals in these portraits are, as I mentioned, friends and acquaintances of the
artist. Sometimes they are photographed with their families, which offers possibilities
for comparison between siblings and between parents and children. The large Hirose
family in Hiroshimafive kids plus Grandma and Grandpalook at us with lively and
attentive faces in a portrait taken in 1987. They are all seized at the right moment, fully
present yet ultimately unreadable. That is one thing these images teach us: The
German Tilly family (1989) and the Japanese Shimada family (1986) seem equally
close to us as we scrutinize their pictures, but in the end the sitters are similarly
removed and incomprehensible. The great merit of these pictures lies in the subtle
balance of proximity and distance which lets the individual features of these human
beings become visible without ever trying to reduce them and their interior worlds to
something we already know. The people sit next to each other, all looking in the same
direction (into the camera, at us). There is no real interaction between them, but on the
other hand theres really no doubt that they belong together, that they are families.
Each of them constitutes a unitybiologically and perhaps psychologically. More
mysterious is the sense of a shared life radiated by Eleonor and Giles Robertson as
they sit at a large wooden table in their home in Edinburgh (1987) and even more so
by Anci and Harry Guy in Groby, UK (1989), who look melancholily into the camera but
seem so firmly united through common hardships and love that no action or gesture is
needed to illustrate intersubjectivity in the most profound sense.

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