Thomas Struth: My work is about ...

from Louisiana Channel [~28min]


“You have to have a reason. That’s the starting point. It has to come from within. You cannot calculate art. I mean, you can. But then it will not survive.” Struth started as a painter and studied at the famous Düsseldorf Academy under Gerhard Richter. “Artists work independently. From when I was 13 years old, I could not imagine working in an environment where somebody else would tell me what to do. I wanted to make my own decisions.” Already as a student, Struth discovered his interest in photography and switched departments to study under Hilla and Bernd Becher. “I pointed my camera at things that were covered and could not be seen clearly. Showing something others don’t see is a principal idea of art.” An early scholarship brought Struth to New York, where he photographed his famous empty street pictures and sold his first works ever. Here, he also became aware of the enormous difference in attitude between post-war Germany and the United States: “In New York, I experienced generous, liberal behaviour of people. In Düsseldorf, people often came up to me and asked: ‘Who gave you permission to do this? Who gave you permission to set the camera here?’ Just normal citizens. Whereas people in New York would come up to me asking what I was doing, and when I told them, they would say: ‘This is fantastic.’ It was a very rewarding time.”

link to a gallery: https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/64-thomas-struth/

Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, West Germany (now Germany), in the state of North Rhine–Westphalia, near Düsseldorf. He trained under Gerhard Richter and Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1980. Richter’s early blurred “photopaintings” as well as the Bechers’ direct, methodically composed black-and-white photographs of Germany’s industrial landscape left a lasting impression on the young artist. Initially interested in painting, Struth turned his attention to photography in 1976. Two years later, he was awarded the Kunstakademie’s first scholarship to New York, where he produced a series of black-and-white cityscapes. These deadpan views, taken from the center of various streets, offer vast perspectives punctuated by a seemingly endless rhythm of architectural facades. Strangely absent of both people and motion, Struth’s realistic cityscapes silence the cacophony traditionally associated with the urban experience. In their careful composition and attention to topographical detail, they recall the nineteenth-century Parisian vistas of French photographers Eugène Atget and Charles Marville. Struth exhibited these works in his first solo exhibition, at P.S. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1) in New York in 1978. He went on to produce similar series in Paris (1979), Rome (1984), Edinburgh (1985), Tokyo (1986), and elsewhere.[ from Guggenheim.org ]

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and one book: https://www.artbook.com/9781942884224.html

This volume is a compilation of representative photographs from each series of works in Struth’s oeuvre: street photographs from the 1970s and ‘80s; empathetic portraits (particularly of families); large-format “museum photographs”; nature studies; jungle photographs (New Pictures from Paradise); and, from the latest series, images from the world of science. As this compendium of his work shows, Struth has succeeded in setting new aesthetic standards thanks to his great precision, chromatic clarity, sound sense of composition and intellectual profundity.

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Wow. Thank you.