thomas-struth paradise reframe

8/16/2019 Thomas-struth Paradise Reframe

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Thomas Struth,Shinju-ku,Tokyo, 1986,black-and-whitephotograph, 33x 26 3/4".

The center is black as a solar eclipse, the yellow petals surrounding it form a dazzlingcorona. There is something ecstatic about sunflowers. At times they look likeheavenly bodies, flaming suns radiating a cosmic glow. That’s how they’re depicted ina series of photographs from the early ’90s by German artist Thomas Struth: close-ups of single blooms, groups of fiery blossoms against a deep blue sky, a paradiselandscape of tall stalks with golden heads that eagerly follow the light. I could hardlyimagine a more welcoming vision than Garden on the Lindberg with Sunflowers, no.1, Winterthur, 1992, presented in Struth’s 2001 book Dandelion Room: a small pathleading through a garden of sun-bathed flowers and into the calm shade of thewoods.

Confronted by an image like this, I feel tempted to parrot critic and Struth enthusiastPeter Schjeldahl: "When I am looking at it, it strikes me as the best picture in theworld."

STRUTH BELONGS TO a small but highly influential group of artists—including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, and Axel Hütte—who emerged sometwenty years ago from the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and radically altered ourperception of the photographic image. (But what may appear from the outside to be atight clique of artists working along similar lines is in fact—or so Struth maintains—aheterogeneous group who may share the same background and similar intellectualcoordinates but who stopped comparing notes years, even decades, ago.) In aGerman art world dominated by painters, this generation’s large-scale photographs,made possible by new printing techniques, mounted an unexpected challenge to theoldest art when they first appeared in the 1980s. By now we are used to theseenormous color images of landscapes, architecture, cities, and people—indeed wehave come to expect them on the walls of the same galleries we used to visit to seepaint on canvas. Still, one shouldn’t forget that this is a relatively recent development.

Thomas Struth, Milan Cathedral(facade), Milan, 1998, colorphotograph, 69 x 87 1/4".

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


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midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now it’s Struth’s momentin the sun: On May 12 an exhibition of some ninety photographs dating from 1977 tothe present opens at the Dallas Museum of Art; it then embarks on a year-long, three-city tour (including a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Askedabout 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 hasnever been attempted before. That people will have a chance to view the full range ofStruth’s oeuvre will no doubt lead to a different perception of his production in itsentirety." And while Struth’s work is too widely known for there to be any majorsurprises here, Wylie notes that there are nonetheless "a number of real sleepers inthe 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 ofcoherence. "For me it’s a lot about integration," he says. "For many years the sheephave been running in different directions. Now I’ll have a chance to herd the flocktogether."

NO ONE WOULD DENY Struth’s knack for producing extraordinarily beautifulimages; in fact, it’s his ability to craft photographs at once formally precise andvisually riveting that has won him the recognition he enjoys. And yet, now that digitaltechnology has opened up what art historian Thomas Crow refers to as the "occultpotential" of photographic representation, and artists such as Gursky and Jeff Wallproduce complicated scenarios montaged out of a multiplicity of shots, thus looseningthe indexical link between picture and reality, a photo such as Garden on the

Lindberg —or for that matter any of Struth’s recent landscapes—may seemastonishingly conventional.

The flower photographs belong to a body of work commissioned by a Swiss hospitalto decorate patients’ rooms, but Struth doesn’t hesitate to show this work in othercontexts, and the Swiss landscapes opened up a new series of images involving far-flung natural environments. So what could possibly be the real aim, the artistic raisond’être, of these landscapes and floral explosions? Surely a seemingly benignaffirmation of nature’s beauty can’t be the sole motive; considering the rigor andconsistency of the artist’s previous work, it’s only natural to look for theoreticalunderpinnings. One thing is clear: Struth traveled quite far—literally andfiguratively—before arriving at the idyllic rural vistas in Winterthur. The route hastaken him from the industrial setting of the Ruhr valley to the most urbanized regionsof France, the United States, China, Japan, and back again. Still, there is a structuralconsistency to the projects that makes it quite clear that the same photographer isresponsible for the colorful image of the small path disappearing into the Swiss fairy-tale forest no less than the 1979 black-and-white photograph of the desertedDüsselstrasse in the artist’s hometown.

My gaze travels diagonally through Struth’s photographs of urban landscapes andbuilding complexes. A multiplicity of trajectories seems built into each image. Oftenthere is a primary object, centrally located and of obvious importance, but it offers nostability for the eye. Instead the gaze slides along the streets, through the muddle ofthick black cables in a Japanese city (Shinju-ku, Toyko, 1986), through thecomplicated 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 HillaBecher’s archaeology of anonymous industrial architecture is thus substituted for anoblique 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 moment’s rest.

Struth, one of Bernd Becher’s very first students at the Düsseldorf academy (hegraduated in 1980), is an artist of great persistence. The number of projects he hasworked on over the last twenty-five years can still be counted on one hand, and mostof them have yet to reach a definite conclusion. The first mature effort consideredworthy of public viewing was a series of black-and-white photographs of streets inDüsseldorf, New York, Munich, and a handful of other cities, taken from the middle ofthe road, the camera placed horizontally at about eye level. In the ’80s Struth alsobegan making portraits, mostly of friends and their families, sometimes in black andwhite, sometimes in color. Two new categories of images—flowers andlandscapes—were added to the repertoire in the early ’90s. Additionally, Struth hasassembled a large group of photos—perhaps his best-known series—showing peoplelooking 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 lesscomprise Struth’s output in its entirety (with a few exceptions, like his recentexperiments with video, including a collaboration with German video artist Klaus vonBruch).


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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 Struth’s early urban photographs is the utter absenceof people in the streets. These are not images of city life—people working, doingbusiness, communicating, interacting, playing—but a strict documentation of urbanspace, of the architectural and societal conditions of human life in different parts of theworld. Struth’s project must be seen as part of a tradition evolving not only from theBechers, his immediate predecessors and teachers, but from such historical figures asEugène Atget and August Sander. In a famous commentary, Walter Benjamin wrote,"Of Atget . . . quite justly it has been said . . . that he photographed [those streets] likescenes of a crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for thepurpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidencefor historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance." Occasionallyone gets a glimpse of a human being in Struth’s urban archive, but these people playno 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 realsubject of the investigation. So what is the subject of these crystalline images? Whathistorical processes—and what crimes—are they evidence of?

When looking at these black-and-white streetscapes I get a strong sense that theworld depicted has already disappeared. One can, of course, still find streets like thisin Düsseldorf or any other large European city, but the temporal modality that thephotographs convey is decidedly not that of presence. As Benjamin Buchloh hassuggested, one could see these images as an archive of a "globally disappearingworld of the ’real’—in this case, the reality of inhabited and experienced social spaceand its public architectural structures." In an era when the obtrusive spaces ofelectronic communication and media technology challenge our old ideas of a publicsphere, pictures of urban architecture in the old-fashioned sense cannot but appear asa 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 ofspatial and temporal reality."

The strict setup of Struth’s early urban photographs makes one aware not only of thelaws of perspective but also of the very fact that these pictures are photographsproduced by an optical machine rather than unmediated representations of somesubjective experience of lived space. The cold geometric objectivity of these imagesmakes it clear that they are not fragments of an ongoing experience of human socialinteraction and exchange but by their very nature more "objective" than humanexperience could ever be. After all, lived experience is embodied experience. Thecamera lens may be thought of as an "eye," but without a natural link to the kinestheticsensations 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: Theydepict cities I know yet have never seen like this (being equipped with two eyesembedded 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 strictemphasis on central perspective has led some to call Struth’s practice a "photographyof photography"—in other words, his pictures make their own conditions of possibilityvisible. The central perspective of the urban photographs can perhaps also be seen asa literalization of the first-person-singular position of the ocularcentric "eye/I" of post-Cartesian epistemology. Given such a point of departure, at issue would no longer bethe mourning of the public sphere’s disappearance but an even more fundamentalquestion: How is society possible? Or phrased phenomenologically, How can we everexperience a shared world? Radically dehumanized, these images do not grant thepossibility of human interaction. What we get is a skeletal frame of being together(architecturally), but no subjects really inhabit the structure.

In Struth’s second large project, his portraits of individuals, couples, and families, onthe other hand, we certainly encounter subjectivity, but these human beings are

always depicted in a private sphere and are never shown interacting as productivemembers of a community. The only group in view is the family. Society remains amystery. And so, to a large extent, does subjectivity, because these portraits make nopretense that the people depicted are ultimately knowable. They remain interestingstrangers—interesting because they convey an inner life that will never be fullygrasped by looking at their image. In that sense Struth is a respectful photographer; henever attempts to make the private feelings, dreams, or thoughts of the other a part ofhis pictures. He manages nonetheless to seize moments of expressiveness, when his


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sitters appear full of life and every square millimeter of their faces seems to carrysignificance. The 1987 portrait of Eleonor Robertson, say, or the 1989 portrait of ClaireChevrier—both black-and-white and very straightforward frontal shots of women, oneyoung, one elderly—offers very little information about the sitters. The backdrops aregeneric: a white wall, patterned wallpaper. And yet both women come across asunquestionably intelligent and sophisticated. They’re people I would like to know.

The individuals in these portraits are, as I mentioned, friends and acquaintances of theartist. Sometimes they are photographed with their families, which offers possibilitiesfor comparison between siblings and between parents and children. The large Hirosefamily in Hiroshima—five kids plus Grandma and Grandpa—look at us with lively and

attentive faces in a portrait taken in 1987. They are all seized at the right moment, fullypresent yet ultimately unreadable. That is one thing these images teach us: TheGerman Tilly family (1989) and the Japanese Shimada family (1986) seem equallyclose to us as we scrutinize their pictures, but in the end the sitters are similarlyremoved and incomprehensible. The great merit of these pictures lies in the subtlebalance of proximity and distance which lets the individual features of these humanbeings become visible without ever trying to reduce them and their interior worlds tosomething we already know. The people sit next to each other, all looking in the samedirection (into the camera, at us). There is no real interaction between them, but on theother hand there’s really no doubt that they belong together, that they are families.Each of them constitutes a unity—biologically and perhaps psychologically. Moremysterious is the sense of a shared life radiated by Eleonor and Giles Robertson asthey sit at a large wooden table in their home in Edinburgh (1987) and even more soby 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 isneeded to illustrate intersubjectivity in the most profound sense.

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thomas-struth paradise reframe

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