“Pantheon” by Thomas Struth (1990). His work examines parallels between the sanctification of art and the secularisation of religious spaces
Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010Whitechapel Gallery, 6th July to 16th September
In the foreground tourists in shorts, their sunglasses pushed back on their heads, stare up at something out of sight, above the camera. Behind them a woman and younger man are engaged in conversation; nearby a young woman looks up enraptured, ignoring whatever her boyfriend is telling her. Meanwhile, a red-haired woman with a shoulder bag stares into the lens, a knowing smile on her face. Other gallery goers are moving on to the next room, or looking at something out of the frame.
This photograph, “Audience 1,” taken from the base of Michaelangelo’s David in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia in 2004, is on show at the Whitechapel Gallery until mid September, in a major retrospective that brings together three decades of Thomas Struth’s art. Struth is from a remarkable stable of contemporary German photographers that includes Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff, collectively known as the Düsseldorf School, all of whom have exploited photography’s documentary potential, while also creating highly artistic large-scale colour images designed for display in galleries.
Struth, who was born in 1954, studied painting with Gerhard Richter before switching to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography course at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The Bechers are renowned for their relentless—some would say tedious—impersonal recording of industrial architecture: water coolers, gasworks, grain elevators and the like, often presented in grids. Their influence on Struth seems apparent in his early street scenes: like the Bechers, his persistent use of a central perspective point produces variations on a theme, making the banal begin to appear interesting. Surprisingly Struth had begun his city sequence before encountering the Bechers’ work. It was the Bechers, though, who encouraged him to experiment with larger format cameras—a significant feature of his style that allows enlargement without loss of detail and the creation of huge colour prints, some of which are nearly 4 metres wide.
In the late 1980s, shifting from street to museum photographs, Struth began to make a significant impact on the art world. After living in both Rome and Naples, he became intrigued by quasi-religious attitudes to art and by secular attitudes to religious spaces. Struth explored these related themes in acutely observed shots of gallery visitors in front of iconic paintings, and in images of tourists visiting churches and cathedrals in Rome, Paris and Venice.
Struth’s series of museum photographs engages with what John Berger once labeled the “bogus religiosity” of those who worship at the altar of art. In particular, Struth aims to rescue masterpieces from “the fate of fame,” what he sees as the result of an overly reverential treatment of art objects. In one work, a Japanese audience shrouded in darkness focuses on the brightly-lit Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. They are watching the illuminated painting as if it were projected on a cinema screen. Here the suggestion is that the presentation of a painting as “iconic” makes it harder to appreciate—just as Jean-Paul Sartre noted that the student who tries too intently to be a good student ends up concentrating on the role, in the process thwarting the experience of learning. There is also a pleasing self-reflexive element to such photography: contemplating images of people looking at images, especially when in a gallery, encourages a heightened self-awareness about the act of looking itself.
The parallels between art worship and secular attitudes to religious spaces are similarly clear in an interior shot of Venice’s San Zaccaria church. Here a couple peruse a Bellini altarpiece, themselves framed by pillars, while fellow tourists contemplate the ornate interior from pews that seem no longer to serve their intended function. This picture provides a bridge between the museum photographs and Struth’s photographs depicting places of worship. Other works in this series include an image (above) of the vast Pantheon Dome in Rome, the scale of the interior dwarfing a collection of tourists, who stare upwards apparently in awe—though, exceptionally in this last case, this is a staged shot in which, because of difficult lighting conditions, Struth positioned the visitors himself.
In a continuing series of family photographs, however, Struth lets his sitters pose themselves in a room or setting of their choice. Here he catalogues families in much the same way the Bechers catalogued water towers, finding, or perhaps discreetly suggesting, remarkable uniformity in family structures and interactions, whether the family is from Philadelphia or Peru, Florence or Shanghai.
By contrast Struth’s most recent work has turned away from the psychological towards the worlds of nature and of technology. In his “Paradise” series he has photographed tapestries of forest and jungle vegetation, their visual complexity echoing the intricate tangles of wires and technological gadgetry in the physics laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, photographed in 2009. These pictures reflect Struth’s ongoing fascination with unpeopled sites that combine human ambition and the most powerful scientific machinery: an interest in what has been called “the technological sublime,” though it could equally be read as technological hubris. As ever with Struth’s photography, the image encourages the viewer to question the subjective intentions that lie behind what might seem like an “objective,” documentary image.
Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010Whitechapel Gallery, 6th July to 16th September
In the foreground tourists in shorts, their sunglasses pushed back on their heads, stare up at something out of sight, above the camera. Behind them a woman and younger man are engaged in conversation; nearby a young woman looks up enraptured, ignoring whatever her boyfriend is telling her. Meanwhile, a red-haired woman with a shoulder bag stares into the lens, a knowing smile on her face. Other gallery goers are moving on to the next room, or looking at something out of the frame.
This photograph, “Audience 1,” taken from the base of Michaelangelo’s David in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia in 2004, is on show at the Whitechapel Gallery until mid September, in a major retrospective that brings together three decades of Thomas Struth’s art. Struth is from a remarkable stable of contemporary German photographers that includes Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff, collectively known as the Düsseldorf School, all of whom have exploited photography’s documentary potential, while also creating highly artistic large-scale colour images designed for display in galleries.
Struth, who was born in 1954, studied painting with Gerhard Richter before switching to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography course at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The Bechers are renowned for their relentless—some would say tedious—impersonal recording of industrial architecture: water coolers, gasworks, grain elevators and the like, often presented in grids. Their influence on Struth seems apparent in his early street scenes: like the Bechers, his persistent use of a central perspective point produces variations on a theme, making the banal begin to appear interesting. Surprisingly Struth had begun his city sequence before encountering the Bechers’ work. It was the Bechers, though, who encouraged him to experiment with larger format cameras—a significant feature of his style that allows enlargement without loss of detail and the creation of huge colour prints, some of which are nearly 4 metres wide.
In the late 1980s, shifting from street to museum photographs, Struth began to make a significant impact on the art world. After living in both Rome and Naples, he became intrigued by quasi-religious attitudes to art and by secular attitudes to religious spaces. Struth explored these related themes in acutely observed shots of gallery visitors in front of iconic paintings, and in images of tourists visiting churches and cathedrals in Rome, Paris and Venice.
Struth’s series of museum photographs engages with what John Berger once labeled the “bogus religiosity” of those who worship at the altar of art. In particular, Struth aims to rescue masterpieces from “the fate of fame,” what he sees as the result of an overly reverential treatment of art objects. In one work, a Japanese audience shrouded in darkness focuses on the brightly-lit Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. They are watching the illuminated painting as if it were projected on a cinema screen. Here the suggestion is that the presentation of a painting as “iconic” makes it harder to appreciate—just as Jean-Paul Sartre noted that the student who tries too intently to be a good student ends up concentrating on the role, in the process thwarting the experience of learning. There is also a pleasing self-reflexive element to such photography: contemplating images of people looking at images, especially when in a gallery, encourages a heightened self-awareness about the act of looking itself.
The parallels between art worship and secular attitudes to religious spaces are similarly clear in an interior shot of Venice’s San Zaccaria church. Here a couple peruse a Bellini altarpiece, themselves framed by pillars, while fellow tourists contemplate the ornate interior from pews that seem no longer to serve their intended function. This picture provides a bridge between the museum photographs and Struth’s photographs depicting places of worship. Other works in this series include an image (above) of the vast Pantheon Dome in Rome, the scale of the interior dwarfing a collection of tourists, who stare upwards apparently in awe—though, exceptionally in this last case, this is a staged shot in which, because of difficult lighting conditions, Struth positioned the visitors himself.
In a continuing series of family photographs, however, Struth lets his sitters pose themselves in a room or setting of their choice. Here he catalogues families in much the same way the Bechers catalogued water towers, finding, or perhaps discreetly suggesting, remarkable uniformity in family structures and interactions, whether the family is from Philadelphia or Peru, Florence or Shanghai.
By contrast Struth’s most recent work has turned away from the psychological towards the worlds of nature and of technology. In his “Paradise” series he has photographed tapestries of forest and jungle vegetation, their visual complexity echoing the intricate tangles of wires and technological gadgetry in the physics laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, photographed in 2009. These pictures reflect Struth’s ongoing fascination with unpeopled sites that combine human ambition and the most powerful scientific machinery: an interest in what has been called “the technological sublime,” though it could equally be read as technological hubris. As ever with Struth’s photography, the image encourages the viewer to question the subjective intentions that lie behind what might seem like an “objective,” documentary image.
