Thomas struth

Thomas Struth: photos so complex 'you could look at them forever'

" "I was looking for some stillness in my life, not just as an artist but a human being in a world where you are washed about by desires, plans and unsatisfied ambitions," he says matter-of-factly. "My question was: how can you not be restless? I can now see that the same question seeped somehow into the work insofar as I was trying to take the restlessness from inside myself and put it into the pictures and on to the walls."


More recently, though, Struth has been photographing another kind of jungle: the cluttered interiors of highly technological environments. These large photographs, which have titles such as Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery and Stellarator Wendelstein 7-x, are as complex as his jungles are calming or his earlier street scenes are austere. "For me," he says, smiling, "they are landscapes of the modern brain. There is this one-sided investment in technology and science as the promised better future – the iPhone, the internet, cloud computing. It seems to me that there has been a dwindling of political thought and engagement as our thinking has become problematically entangled in these kinds of self-focused, endlessly repeating desires. That is why I wanted these pictures to look somehow exhausting."


Studying painting as a young man, Struth realised that he was "making big super-realist photographic paintings that just seemed pointless and a bit stupid". Instead, he began photographing his hometown, Düsseldorf, and showed the results to both Richter and the great Bernd Becher, whose own photographs of industrial buildings and towers, taken with his wife, Hilla, the young Struth had never seen. "Richter never liked my paintings but really liked my photographs. Bernd was a little surprised, but polite," says Struth, chuckling now at his youthful naivety. "But I had an anxious time afterwards thinking, 'Maybe he thinks I have copied him!'" "

 (From - The Guardian)
 

I think it is interesting to see how Bernd and Hilla Becher – who worked closely with struth at the Düsseldorf academy have influenced his work, the objective approach and the strong architectural structures that feature in his work display key simularitites with the documentary style images by Bernd and Hilla Bercher.

His photographs are a continual study in to the ways in which architecture is capable of giving information about the history and identity of the spaces he photographs. I read in my book (Art Photography Now - Susan Bright) that Struth is not interested in creating an archive of the cities, but instead has a desire to raise questions about responsibility and the effects of the natural and built environment.

 

"Bernd Becher, who along with his wife, Hilla, photographed relics of the industrial age in Germany, England, and the United States, died last Friday in Rostock, Germany at age 75. According to the photographer Thomas Struth, who was once a student of the Bechers, he died following heart surgery. These days, when photography is all the rage in the conceptual art world, it is hard to remember how pioneering the Bechers’ work was." 

                     (quote from Struth)