Thomas Struth
15 September 2002 – 5 January 2003
www.moca-la.org
In Los Angeles after opening in
Dallas and before heading to New York and Chicago, this major retrospective
confirms Thomas Struth’s unique standing in the so-called Düsseldorf School
of photographers who were once students of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Unlike
his closest peers Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, Struth takes a completely
straightforward approach to his work, one that will allow the kind of
elaborate staging found in the work of Jeff Wall, but will not accommodate
the countless choices of digital manipulation. Rather than suggesting some
type of moralising position about the ‘integrity’ of photography as a
practice (or the photograph as object and/or document), Struth’s focused
practice from the last 25 years is one of speculation, an ‘open’
contemplation of a moment during which everything in the picture is provided
with what can only be understood as self-awareness.
Struth is best known for his series of Museum Pictures in which museum-goers
are shown in the act of not only contemplating major works of art (from
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa to the Pergamon Altar) but also constructing
their own type of ‘architecture’ amongst themselves – a
temporary-yet-timeless structure that exists only because of a collective
act of perception. It is precisely this type of structure that clearly
fascinates Struth. In all of his work – from the early black-and-white (and
most Becher-like) photographs of empty streets in Germany, New York, and
elsewhere, to his most recent series of breathtakingly intricate photographs
of forests and jungles in such places as Brazil and China – we are presented
time and time again with a ‘portrait’ of this construction that defines it
as fundamentally human. It is no surprise, then, that Struth’s portraits of
families function as the visual and conceptual fulcrum of his practice,
containing as they do their own kind of social architecture – in terms of
their presentation of not only a specific (psychological) family dynamic but
also a critically formal visual framework just as sturdy as that found in
any building.
Terry R. Myers