Thomas Struth

Since the late 1970s, Thomas Struth (b. 1954) has been capturing our time. Reconciling forms of documentation and contemplation, his photographs frame the world today as seen through empty streets in different cities, cultural venues, and scenes of worship, as well as images of nature, family portraits, and, more recently, sites of industrial and technological innovation, often underlining the tension between banality and the sublime. The examination of different situations and their impact on collective behaviour is typical of the artist’s work. His recent images introduce new subjects of reflection, such as the relationship between humans and machines.

‘Thomas Struth is a reluctant modernist. On the one hand, his photographs seek to capture, in non-distinct street scenes and amongst groups of anonymous tourists, the beauty found in ephemeral and fugitive moments rather than poses honed by tradition. These photographs discover beauty in what had been, before the advent of modernity, considered off-limits to aesthetic contemplation: the allegedly soulless architecture of post-war Europe; the poor dwellings in the emerging world; the back areas and unacknowledged zones where museums, cathedrals and other spaces of spiritual and cultural gathering are purely functional sites of usage. But in many of his photographs, Struth does not simply discover but inscribes beauty in unexpected places.’

Ulrich Baer, ‘The Reluctant modernism of Thomas Struth’, in exh. cat., Thomas Struth, Napoli: MADRE Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, 2008