Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010

nikos efstratiou

Today, I visited Thomas Struth’s exhibition in ‘Kunst Sammlung Nordrhein Westfalen’ in Düsseldorf, a city, whose name is immediately associated with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the art world. Some of the artists/photographers that have either worked or studied there (and in some cases have done both), are Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff to name a few. The same applies to Thomas Struth, who at the same academy, was initially trained as a painter -an influence that is evident in his photographic practice- under Gerhard Richter. It is worth mentioning here that a family portrait of the Richter family is included in the exhibition and it was one of my personal favourites, because of the way each family member has situated her/himself in relation to each other but also in relation to the way they have positioned themselves in their domestic environment. Struth ‘jumped’ into the art of photography in 1976 and was a student of the Becher’s, with which he maintained a personal relationship for the years to come.

 © Thomas Struth, The Richter Family

The exhibition includes a large number of Struth’s prints, spanning from 1978 until 2010. His images range in style, form and even politics, but his aesthetics remain intact and solid. In addition, his curiosity remains unanimous throughout his career. Throughout his work, his effort to understand and to find out as much as possible about our surrounding worlds is powerfully manifested and through his photographic practice he gives us hints and points of view of the possible answers. Thomas Struth incorporates in his work the past, the present and the future at once.

His early b&w images of post-war Düsseldorf and street views from around the world are characteristic for their geometrical symmetry and excellent use of the zone system. Then, in his pictures of jungles and forests (Pictures from Paradise), he displays the uncanniness of the locations, all of which are yet to be altered from human presence and intervention. These in turn give way to the similarly complex pictures, yet more abstract and sci-fi that he did in technological centres he visited using a 10x8 camera. Moreover, the exhibition includes gigantic prints of modernisation and anarchic development that is taking place around the world, commenting on the one hand, on our globalised economy and market and on the other at the ‘end of history’. 

Of course the human existence is also present at the exhibition, with the influence of psychoanalytic theory being apparent in his family portraits. Moreover, his images of visitors in famous art galleries and museums bear similarities to a sociological study of human behaviour, bringing to mind the typological work of his compatriot August Sander. Their main difference lies in the fact that while Sander does not offer the viewer much information about the subject’s immediate environment, Struth incorporates the location, which is a very specific and familiar cultural space, at least for his Western audience. Moreover, while Sander is concerned with individuals, Struth photographs big groups of people.

The collection currently being showcased is a perfect opportunity for one to enjoy, learn, understand and try to digest the work of one of the most important photographer’s of the 20^th century. The exhibition in Düsseldorf, continues until June 19^th and then moves to the Whitechapel Gallery in London from July 6^th until September 16^th 2011.