Thomas Struth : relationships to the time in his photographs' work
Thomas Struth is a German photographer born in 1954 in Geldern. He trained at the Düsseldorf’s Künstakademie from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting with Peter Kleemann and Gerhard Richter before settling on Bernhard and Hilla Becher's photography studio. He ranks today among the foremost exponents of contemporary German photography.
Thomas Struth’s work is characterised by a refusal to indulge in the spectacular. There is nothing unusual in the way the photographs are made. The artist purposely does not focus on anything in the field of vision of the photograph, everything is sharp, nothing is blurred. This reinforces and contributes to create a strong neutral effect in the picture. Every form of rhetoric is absent. As he said in an early interview when he was still student at the Academy of Düsseldorf “Photographs that impress me have no personal signature”. He is not looking for aestheticism. The framing and the composition in his photographs never lead the gaze to any formal or substantive motif. It is in reaction to the context of general devaluation and loss of meaning of photography that Thomas Struth chose to do picture with a rigor that he acquired from the teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher. He doesn’t want to increase this negative phenomenon and wants to enable this medium to be still envisaging in artistic terms. His work is a sensitive and ample vision of reality without artificial techniques which would divert viewers from the real meaning that the photograph has to communicate. The apparent simplicity of his approach is based on a balanced combination of analytic power and visual insight.
He has explored a large variety of subjects over the years which are mainly cityscapes, landscapes, portraits or group portraits, church and museum interiors and flowers. In analysing these different themes, it appears that we can find a common feature linking all these works all together. It is an inquiry into the relationships between men and time.
Thomas Struth. Water Street, New York
Views of banal buildings, prospects of streets without qualities, anonymous facades- these are the characteristics that first strike us when we discover Thomas Struth’s images of streets. Usually in black and white, they present a frontal, eye-height view, with no optical distortion to disrupt the impression that this is a neutral, objective recording of reality. Frequently there is an almost total absence of people in Struth’s cityscapes which provides a feeling of desolation. We are left wondering where the people are, or could they even be dead? There are obvious signs and suggections of recent human activities in the photographs, such as linen drying at the windows, cars parked on the street. It reinforces a kind of frightened perception. The photograph is situated almost out of a realistic time. These urban landscapes are also a critical description of different human habitats. In observing more deeply these pictures, we begin to realize the omnipresent relationships to time and to history. Cities are like a book opened at several pages at the same time. They are a superposition of historic and social layers. Urban fabrics witness buildings built at different periods, buildings which have stood through the years. We can see more recent constructions which we can assume have replaced older ones. There is a feeling of incarnate eternity in the architecture but also a feeling that we are living in a transient world where nothing, nobody is going to remain eternally. The use of black and white contributes to make the age difference between the elements on the photograph less visible than in the reality thereby creating a sense of timelessness. New buildings look as old as the genuinely old buildings. There is a complete loss a temporality. The artist succeeds in this way to make live together different time periods in the same photograph. In other words, it is like if the photograph was taken for exemple in 1960 and in 1978 but appears as only one.
Related to the cityscapes, since the beginning of 1990s, Thomas Struth has explored landscape photography. Seemingly a counterpoint to the images of the streets Indeed, one could argue that the urban landscapes refer to history. We can read into the texture of the urban fabric, traumatic events such as war, economic crisis or prosperity as well as a notion of temporality. On the other hand, landscapes evoke the immemorial, the permanence. These two works constitute an opposition between human activities and lives which have a start and an end and the timelessness of nature. As seen in Struth's other work, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the landscapes. The artist presents us with nature ,a source of calm and consolation. He uses colour here to render the infinite chromatic range of the vegetation and earth in a soft and limpid light. Still in comparison to the urban views, nature landscapes are lighter because they are free of history’s oppression. For instance, in the
Intact nature from Paradise
One of the other pillars of Thomas Struth’s work is the portrait. These photographs are portraits of unknown subjects, whose faces share but one distinguising feature: the way their gazes focuses on the camera lens. This is an inquiry into social circumstances and the psychological presence of his sitters. The eye of the artist becomes our own. This meeting of gazes creates strong emotions for the person viewing the photograph, a mise en abyme mirror effect. We think we are the person in the portrait; the gaze of the stranger is our gaze. It forces our perceptions out of our own body and leads us to establish a very intimate relationship with the person in the portrait. The connection with time is made in two different ways. First we see ourselves either younger or older through the eyes of the person photographed, ostensibly constituting a kind of time projection. Eventually, the impalpable instant is fixed forever in a photograph and in the gaze of the person.
This very particular exchange only occurs with the portraits of individuals persons. The family portraits are very different. All the memebers of the same family, standing in a group in front of the camera and all staring at the artist's eye, creates a sensation of strength and superiority emerging from the family unit. They are united as a family group by the act of gazing together at us. This pose frequently presents a family image far different from the familial scene conjured up by psychoanalysis : a scene in which the family members are so caught up in their internal jealousies, unsatisfied desires, or unspoken reproaches that they cannot unite in looking outward together. We can feel also the fundamental role of the family unit in the perpetuation of the codes specific to each social category. Clothes, posture, the home and the way they are staring at the lens, all these elements attest to a type of education, a way of being characteristic of one particular social category or another. Like in other example of Struth’s work, the time connection is made through the singular power of heredity, plain to see in the photographs. We can observe in the different generations standing on the same stage the repetition of physiognomic characteristics as well as the mysterious emergence of differences between members of the same family. We can feel that the family in its whole is stronger than the running time. As in the cityscapes pictures where we can find buildings from different periods standing all together, the artist manages here to introduce the same time complexity by having many generations of the family in the same photograph. It seems to be a message similar that if we focus on a single building, it is possible that it will be demolished after a few years. But if we look at the city in its entirety, it will remain living forever. It is the same regard brought to the family portrait here. A single person will change throughout the years and ultimately die. But the whole line will not change; there will be constantly new generations replacing the older ones. The strength of a family is seemingly a way to fight against mortality and to create permanence with, ironically, individually perishable elements. This is the power of the group, the ability of a species constantly recycle. It is as a victory of life over death.
The Hirose Family, Hiroshima, 1987Continuity his inquiry of the relationships between men, time and history, Thomas Struth has produced a notable set of photographs taken inside churches and museums. For the first time the artist works in a large-format colour. These places of conservation and memory constitute a fascinating testimony to our contemporary relation to works of arts. Although none of them is particularly similar, church and museum photographs present a common composition. Typically in the background they are huge or famous paintings and majestic architecture while the foreground is often occupied by people admiring the background’s pieces of art. The artist uses a long-time exposure to capture the paintings and the architecture of the place as sharply as possible in a natural lighting.
Church of San Zaccaria, Venice, 1995
As a result and purposely, people may sometimes be blurred or moving because of the time required to take the photograph. This reinforces the power and permanence of the artworks compared to the brevity of the visitors' presence ( in the museum but also on the earth). The one taken inside the church of San Zaccaria in Venice in 1995 exemplifies Struth's enquiry. Within a single composition Struth incorporates a virtual typology of the ways of observing. Several visitors, sitting on the church pews either in small groups or alone, appear to be looking toward an altar. The young man in the foreground is staring ahead with a particular concentration. Other visitors are looking around or gazing up at the ceiling. There is a couple looking at the great Bellini Madonna and Child. Presumably, like many of the people sitting down, they are tourists but it is not possible to be certain. Some of the visitors to the church could equally have come to worship. There is a feeling that people in the picture are believers, although what they believe in we cannot know. Within the panels on the walls, there are a huge number of figures looking at different incidents or points of interest. Amongst this mass of images, there is one point of absolute stillness – Giovanni Bellini's great Madonna and Child. On the right hand side of Bellini's painting stands the figure of a saint immersed in a book. Of all the characters in the church, ancient and modern, this is the figure who is most absorbed in a world of his own. The artist, as much as in his composition as in his choice of colour creates connections between the piece of art and the audience. He implies that he wants to have museum’s visitors to appear similar in certain ways to the figures in the paintings in order to create temporal links between them, thus allowing the older paintings to take on a contempory aspect.These exchanges are characterized essentially by the physical presence of the people rather than by some visual exercise of the observer.
Art institute of Chicago
