PHOTO:Thomas Struth

The images of Thomas Struth receive their signature character from the questions they raise about the relevance of public space, family ties, nature, culture, and the limits of new technologies. Thus, Struth addresses essential questions like the instability of social structures and the fragility of human existence through images whose formal elegance prompts the audience’s participation and empathy towards these topics.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive

Thomas Struth  solo exhibition at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a complete journey through five decades of one of the most influential European post-war photographers, whose evolution as an artist has been marked by social concerns. This exhibition connects Struth’s initial concepts (seen in the archival material that the artist has collected over the years) to his well-defined groups of finished works, such as “Unconscious Places”, “Family Portraits”, “Audience”, “Museum Photographs”, “New Pictures from Paradise”, and “This Place”. These series, in turn, establish a dialogue with other works, such as “Berlin Project”, a video conceived in 1997 in collaboration with media artist Klaus vom Bruch, with other more recent groups like “Nature & Politics”, “Animals”, and with the landscape and flower photographs created for the wards of Lindberg hospital. Unconscious Places: While Thomas Struth was studying at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973–80, he began photographing the streets of the city, first using a 35 mm camera, then a large-format plate camera. Shortly after, during a nine-month stay in New York, he photographed the streets of that city’s neighborhoods, capturing their characteristics and atmosphere. The images he subsequently took in different cities abandoned the central perspective of his earlier works. Struth photographed buildings and urban landscapes, presenting social and economic developments in concentrated form. The leveling aspects of globalization, the structural results of fast- growing late-twentieth-century economies, and the effects of an increasing world population are the subjects of the photographs in the series Unconscious Places, a title that refers to the visible traces of the unconscious social processes that have been inscribed in urban structures. Family Portraits: In the early 1980s, Thomas Struth worked with Düsseldorf psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann, who incorporated family pictures of his patients as part of their therapy. In a joint project, they selected around sixty of these images, and Struth reproduced and enlarged them into uniform black-and- white prints. This visual research project later became the basis for Struth’s series of family portraits, which emerged in the mid-1980s as a way to thank the people who hosted him on his stays in Edinburgh and Yamaguchi. Struth’s portraits are not snapshots, but the result of formal sessions, during which the models familiarize themselves with the camera. The images allow for different interpretations, showing both the family members’ physical likenesses and their social context. Struth succeeds in capturing each of his subjects as individuals and also as part of a family structure. Museum Photographs: In the late 1980s, Thomas Struth began his “Museum Photographs”, which allowed him to combine his former passion for painting with photography. Past and present meet in these images, which explore the relationship between historical works of art and their viewers. In 1999, a decade after his first “Museum Photographs”, Struth revisited the series. This time, the images expand the original theme of the series into other photographic approaches and perspectives. Struth includes himself as an observer in one picture, while in another he focuses exclusively on the artwork and the empty space around it, and in yet another he shows how a single work in a cinematographically constructed display case is presented as an unfamiliar cultural-historical object. Dandelion Room: In the early 1990s, as part of the expansion of the Lindberg hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland, Thomas Struth was invited by the director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Dieter Schwarz, to furnish new patients’ rooms with photographs. Over several visits, Struth came to empathize with people subjected to lengthy periods of hospitalization. He photographed landscapes in the region and hung these photographs opposite the hospital beds, so that patients could look at familiar motifs. At the head of each bed, Struth hung a close-up of a plant, which, in its portrait-like character, depicted its individuality, beauty, and vulnerability, thereby becoming a metaphor for the patient’s own situation. Berlin-Project: In 1997, together with media artist Klaus vom Bruch, Thomas Struth created a video for which the two artists filmed scenes independently at different locations around the world and then edited their material together. Because the scenes were filmed using stationary cameras, in sequences with large crowds the individual practically disappears, or is only fleetingly perceived. In four projections with original sound, everyday scenarios from different cultures are depicted, along with the attendant phenomena of the big city, such as speed and random juxtapositions and encounters. This work also addresses the easy accessibility of exotic locations and travel in general in an era of mass tourism and the accompanying flood of holiday photos as a socially relevant phenomenon. The original plan was to present the individual scenes in Berlin on a large video wall in a public space (like images used for advertising purposes) to confront local passersby with passersby from other parts of the world; it was never realized for technical reasons. New Pictures from Paradise: In 1998, in anticipation of the approaching new millennium, Thomas Struth photographed the tropical rainforest in Daintree, in the north east of Australia. Afterwards, the artist captured woodlands, rain forests, and jungles in places such as China, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Peru, and the United States in what he has called his “most intuitive” works. He was interested in images that could be viewed independent of identification or classification: the full-frame presentation, the large-format depiction, and the explicitness and unique quality of the subject matter prompt a purely sensory-based perception process. The title of this body of work echoes this particular manner of perception of an overcrowded landscape, impossible to classify either in time or in place. Read This Like Seeing It for the First Time:  In 2003, in collaboration with the Fine Arts program at the Bern University of the Arts and the musician Frank Bungarten, Struth created the video Read This Like Seeing It for the First Time for the Bern Biennale. Almost five hours long, the video of Bungarten’s guitar classes at the Lucerne School of Music was filmed with two cameras simultaneously, and the two recordings were then projected onto separate screens. The different perspectives and ways of seeing condense the scenes into intense moments of a learning process shaped by the teacher-student relationship in the context of artistic development. Audience: In 2004, Franca Falletti, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, invited Thomas Struth and other artists to realize an artwork as an homage to Michelangelo’s David on the occasion of the sculpture’s 500th anniversary. Struth’s response was a departure from his approach with his Museum Photographs: he exclusively photographed the gallery’s visitors as they contemplated the sculpture. Although he situated himself in its immediate vicinity, he did not include David in his pictures. This shift in perspective places the focus on the audience and their reactions to the celebrated work of art, attesting to the sculpture’s timeless aesthetic power and demonstrating that its enduring effect on the viewer is lessened not at all by its countless reproductions. Struth continued this project with a series of works based on close-ups of people looking at Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Nature & Politics: This series, begun in 2007, comprises images of advanced technological developments in international companies and research laboratories. Aerospace, energy production, medical research, artificial intelligence, and robotics are among the technologies of the future that interest Struth. The artist juxtaposes these photographs of technology with others depicting contemporary urban, cultural, and recreational landscapes, such as Disneyland or the Atlanta aquarium. The series explores the boundaries—and representability—of progress, globalization, and technology. The shots are often dense metaphors of a development in which technology is no longer clearly or palpably communicable, but rather understandable in its complexity only for highly specialized experts. This Place: In 2009 French photographer Frédéric Brenner invited Thomas Struth to participate in a project involving 12 international photographers. In addition to Brenner and Struth, the group included Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington. In the course of many journeys taken over a period of several years, the artists created photographs in both Israel and the West Bank. The undertaking gave Struth the opportunity to condense his shots into a unique description of the situation in the region. The series traces a multilevel portrait of the present conditions of Israel, Palestine, and their inhabitants. Animals: Since fall 2016, Thomas Struth has been working on a group of still lifes of dead animals that were taken to the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin after dying of natural causes. These striking new works, precise and sensitively rendered, represent the artist’s pictorial stance in a surprising new manner. They draw on a range of precedents, from Struth’s recent photographs of medical settings to the history of memento mori. Archive: Thomas Struth’s archive consists of work materials, contact sheets, index cards, sketches, invitations, and posters and installation photographs of his exhibitions, as well as early drawings, montages, paintings, photographic studies, notebooks, research materials, and correspondence with curators and other artists. The selection from the archive presented here offers a comprehensive chronological insight into the artist’s working processes and shows the development of his work. This one being the second time to be shown ever.

Info: Curators: Thomas Weski y Lucía Agirre, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra 2, Bilbao, Duration: 2/9/19-9/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus