Thomas Struth

From Painting to Photography

Struth entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973 and began studying with Gerhard Richter the following year. At first, photography served as source material for realist paintings: he used a 35mm camera to photograph passersby and city streets.^*1 He later recalled realizing that his interest lay less in handling paint than in “making pictures,” and that the photograph itself already contained the image he needed.^*13 He also said that he was drawn to observing things that existed in the world and thinking through social and political questions, instead of projecting his own psychology onto the picture.^*14 In 2015, he described himself first as a “picture-maker” and explained that he uses a camera because painting the complicated reality before him would require an enormous amount of time.^*19

The compositional concerns Struth had learned through painting remained active after he chose photography. A MoMA exhibition catalogue describes Struth’s aims as investigative and reportorial while characterizing his organization of the picture as “painterly”; it compares his early empty streets with Richter’s gray urban paintings of the 1960s.^*29 Richter blurred photographic source images as he translated them into painted surfaces. Struth kept buildings, pavement, signs, vacant lots, and other elements already present in the world together within the photographic frame. Photography suited his desire to register many existing pieces of information at once and to think about society through their arrangement.

Postwar Germany and the Street

Assisting Richter with Atlas and encountering its accumulation of private and press photographs gave Struth experience of comparing images and considering how meaning changes across a group, instead of approaching each photograph in isolation.^*1 Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, and others also visited the academy. Their presence brought him close to art that treated the site, institution, and social setting of a work as part of the work itself.^*3

At the same time, the West Germany in which Struth grew up was rebuilding its cities while pushing the crimes and destruction of the war into the past and trying to establish the appearance of a “normal society”.^*18 His turn to streets did not depend on using politicians or citizens as representative figures. A single street could contain prewar buildings, postwar reconstruction, the width of roads, vacant lots, and new commercial architecture. Struth understood these physical layers as evidence of what a society had preserved, demolished, and chosen to build over a long span of time.^*2 Here he developed a method of reading human choices through the places left by those choices, without photographing the decision-makers themselves.

The Bechers’ Class

In 1976, on Richter’s recommendation, Struth transferred to Bernd Becher’s photography class. He had not previously known the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and later recalled worrying that the street photographs he had already made might look similar to theirs.^*13 The chronology rules out a simple account of his empty streets as an imitation of the Bechers’ style. What the class offered was an environment in which photographic history could be discussed alongside literature, politics, economics, and film, and in which photography became a means of thinking about society.^*1

The Bechers photographed disappearing blast furnaces, water towers, and other industrial structures under controlled conditions—uniform light, frontal viewpoints, and consistent distance—and arranged multiple photographs in grids. This made it possible to compare shared structural features with individual differences among buildings serving the same purpose.^*17 Struth inherited this rigor of comparison. Yet, as the Museo del Prado has noted, he resisted organizing cities into a strict typology or “inventory”.^*16 His concern was the way different periods, uses, and judgments accumulated within a single street.

Monika Perenyei places this formation alongside Struth’s experience classifying and arranging photographs for Richter’s Atlas, giving the Bechers only one part of the account.^*26 From the Bechers came a method of controlling photographic conditions so that differences could be compared; from Richter came the experience of seeing meanings shift when unlike images were placed together. Struth later changed composition, the presence or absence of figures, and the scale of the image as he moved among streets, families, museums, forests, and scientific facilities. The governing question became what kind of comparison would make each subject intelligible; preserving a single visual style was secondary.

From Streets to Scientific Facilities

Across Struth’s work, human decisions repeatedly appear as forms embedded in objects and spaces. On the street, replaced buildings, roads, signs, and vacant lots carry the results of urban planning and economic activity. In the family portraits, where people sit, how far apart they are, and how they face the camera register how a family chooses to present itself. In museums, the placement of paintings and the positions assumed by viewers record habits of looking. In scientific facilities, researchers and politicians may be absent, yet their decisions remain materialized in machines, pipes, and technical layouts. The subjects change from series to series, but the question persists: what can close observation of a human-made situation tell us about the society that produced it?^*14

In the early street photographs, Struth placed the camera near the center of the road and used one-point perspective so that the buildings on either side could be examined under comparable conditions. Perenyei describes this central perspective as a prototype for what Struth identified as an “impersonal interest,” while also noting that it creates a theatrical space that carries the eye deep into the picture.^*26 The centered composition helped make differences in architectural age, function, and alteration legible within the frame.

His compositions changed over time. Nana Last argues that the later street photographs changed by incorporating what Struth had learned from photographing people in portraits and from constructing denser pictorial fields in the museum photographs.^*32 Families called for frontality; museums required relations between paintings and viewers; rainforests demanded dense, nearly undifferentiated detail; technological sites required a legible view of elaborate apparatus. Central perspective and frontal presentation therefore remained tools, not a fixed signature style.

Family Portraits and Family Arrangement

Family Portraits began with a collaborative project with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann. Family photographs brought by patients were copied at the same size so that arrangement, generation, and physical distance among figures could be compared.^*5 In the portraits that followed, the families themselves discussed the location and arrangement, and every sitter looked toward the lens. The 1986 The Shimada Family, Yamaguchi, in the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, is an early example.^*6 Struth’s aim was narrower than a classification of society by occupation or class. He was examining what becomes visible when one family constructs a public image of “this is who we are” before the camera.

Struth avoids both the stolen “natural” instant and a staged psychological drama in which sitters are assigned roles. A CAA Reviews discussion of Michael Fried emphasizes that the subjects are fully aware of being photographed, yet cannot control every resemblance of face and body, posture, proximity, or culturally specific family gesture that enters the image.^*28 Clothing and seating positions record the self-image the family consciously constructs; bodily resemblance, gaze, and distance record features that cannot be completely staged. The photograph becomes a place to compare the image the family intends to present with the arrangement actually recorded by the camera. The 1997 volume Thomas Struth: Portraits, with essays by Thomas Weski, Norman Bryson, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, also shows how the series has been considered through the histories of portraiture and painting as well as questions of representation and viewing.^*33

Museum Photographs and the Viewer

The origins of Museum Photographs lie partly in Struth’s time living in Rome and Naples in the late 1980s. He became attentive to the difference between settings where religious paintings remained connected to church architecture and everyday belief and secular museums where works had been separated from their original use and history and displayed as “masterpieces”.^*7 When he photographed the art historian Giles Robertson in front of an old painting in 1987, Struth later recalled recognizing the possibility of placing “a present moment and a historical moment in one photographic plane”.^*7 The museum thus became a site where he could observe how paintings from the past are seen by people in the present.

The 2005 volume Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs includes Hans Belting’s “Photography and Painting” and Walter Grasskamp’s “Observing the Observer,” among other texts.^*27 The book addresses the meaning of the paintings themselves and the way works are presented within museum architecture and perceived by viewers.^*27 Struth’s photographs bring figures in old paintings, frames, walls, floors, and contemporary visitors into the same picture. Several temporal layers coexist: the past in which the painting was made, the present in which museum visitors encounter it, and the later present in which another viewer confronts Struth’s finished photograph. Museum Photographs makes those layers comparable within a single frame, asking how images from the past continue to live through present-day exhibition spaces and habits of viewing.

That relationship depends on exact composition. According to Struth’s archive, visitors in most of the series were not staged. He established the camera position and frame first, then waited for a configuration in which the painting and the people cohered within it.^*7 Perenyei draws a continuity between the central perspective of the early street photographs and the central or oblique camera positions used in the museum pictures.^*26 Perspective that had helped compare buildings in the streets now linked the perspectival space contained within a painting to the real space occupied by museum visitors.

San Zaccaria, Venice (1995) makes this structure especially clear. The Met explains that Bellini’s altarpiece uses light and perspective to create an imagined space beyond the wall, while Struth’s photograph places that painted space and the tourists in front of it within a single photographic field.^*30 The saints in the altarpiece, the church architecture, and the seated and standing visitors occupy a continuous depth. A pictorial space composed roughly five centuries earlier therefore appears contiguous with the present space of viewing. The painting itself becomes another spatial system within the photograph’s composition.

New Pictures from Paradise and the Rainforest

In New Pictures from Paradise, begun in 1998, many of the social clues present in earlier works—architecture, signs, clothing, furniture—largely disappear. Struth said that in a Walker Evans photograph, or in his own street photographs, he could move from cars to houses to terrain and analyze how a place had been made. In the forest, he sought such a density of detail that the viewer could no longer decide which information should count as primary.^*14 Guggenheim Bilbao also notes that Struth described these as his most intuitive pictures.^*9

The series tests the limits of the analytic method that had guided much of his earlier work. In the streets, differences among buildings offered points of comparison; in museums, the positions of viewers and paintings could be read against one another. The forest does not easily separate foreground from background or significant detail from incidental detail. Greater resolution produces more information without guaranteeing a direct path to understanding. Looking therefore takes longer, and the gap between seeing and comprehending becomes part of the work itself.

Leonard Street

The 1978 Leonard Street, Tribeca, New York is a key example of Struth’s early street photographs. The camera is positioned near the center of the road, with façades, pavement, parked cars, and signs organized around a vanishing point. The Met places the work at an intersection of the Bechers’ comparative method, the urban architectural photography of Charles Marville and Eugène Atget, and Minimal and Conceptual art.^*4 New York streets brought buildings of different periods and functions into the same view. Photographing multiple streets from a consistent position made the accumulated choices that had produced a street comparable; individual buildings became evidence within that larger structure.^*16

Museum Photographs

In the 1989 Louvre 2, Paris, adults standing before paintings, children seated on the floor, and the architecture of the gallery all occupy the same frame.^*8 Struth set up a large-format camera and waited, without staging the crowd, until the painting and the viewers formed a workable configuration. The subject therefore includes the present-day act of looking, not just the isolated masterpiece.^*7 The museum visitor is both a viewer within the photograph and, for us, a figure whose behavior as a viewer can itself be observed.

In the 1999 National Museum of Art, Tokyo, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People is brightly illuminated before a darkened audience, giving the exhibition a structure close to that of a cinema screen. The Met notes the contrast between figures advancing through revolutionary history inside the painting and late-twentieth-century viewers standing still before the luminous image.^*25 The photograph asks how a history painting centered on collective action is encountered by contemporary bodies within an exhibition shaped by tourism and international cultural exchange.

At the Museo del Prado in 2005, Struth revised the method of the series itself. His longstanding interest in Las Meninas brought him to the museum, but after making Audiences he felt he could no longer photograph “the backs of people standing before a painting” in the same way. He moved into the center of the room and framed the scene so that painted figures and actual visitors overlapped more closely.^*36 To keep both paintings and crowds in focus with an 8×10 camera, he installed roughly fifteen flash units across the ceilings of several rooms.^*36 The large format and flash made it possible to keep painted figures, contemporary viewers, and details of the galleries equally available for comparison within one photograph.

Nature & Politics

From 2007 onward, NASA facilities, shipyards, nuclear-fusion research sites, and pharmaceutical plants became major subjects. Work at the Kennedy Space Center helped direct Struth toward places where science, politics, money, and power converge and where “technology and ambition” take material form.^*10 Nature & Politics includes research and industrial sites such as CERN and addresses expectations placed on science and technology, the desire to intervene in nature, and the limits of knowledge.^*11 The near-absence of people directs attention to the material outcome of decisions made by researchers, corporations, and states—enormous machines, pipes, cables, and controlled environments—rather than to individual personalities or the spectacle of machinery.^*12

In this sense, the empty streets and the scientific facilities remain methodologically connected across several decades. In the early streets, Struth did not photograph the politicians or architects who made the city; he photographed the condition in which their decisions remained visible as buildings and roads. In Nature & Politics, he again avoids portraits of individual scientists or executives and brings into one picture apparatus built from the work of many specialists, budgets, and research goals. Michael Fried argues that the technology photographs are extraordinarily dense with traces of human purpose and design, inviting viewers to understand their details while withholding a complete grasp of the whole.^*35 In the early streets, visual clarity assisted comparison. Here, comparable resolution also reveals how contemporary technological systems can exceed the understanding of any single person.

Large-Format Color Photography and Exhibition Space

The large color photographs Struth adopted from the late 1980s onward do more than display abundant detail. Perenyei analyzes Museum Photographs within the development of the “photographic tableau” in contemporary art from the late 1970s onward, arguing that photography became an autonomous “picture-object” as it intersected with film, performance, sculpture, and the Western tradition of the single pictorial field.^*26 A small print can be examined at close range. A photograph that occupies a large section of wall asks the viewer to move physically—stepping back to take in the whole, then approaching to follow details.

Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before discusses large-scale photographs by Struth, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, and others as works encountered on the wall in a manner historically associated with painting.^*28 For Struth, this scale is especially consequential in Museum Photographs. People are already looking at art inside the photograph; when an actual viewer stands before the large print, his or her own posture of looking can be measured against theirs. Scale directs attention toward the act of viewing itself.

Discussing Times Square, New York (2000), The Met argues that the scale and pictorial complexity of Struth’s work helped bring to photography the kind of sustained attention historically directed toward painting.^*31 From a distance, the city and crowd can be read as a single composition. At close range, attention moves among advertisements, stock-market displays, architectural surfaces, and individual bodies. Enlargement turns the quantity of information in a photograph into time actually spent looking.

How Struth Differs from the Bechers

For roughly half a century, the Bechers concentrated on a single field of disappearing industrial architecture. They standardized weather, distance, and viewpoint, then placed multiple photographs together so that individual variations could be understood through a common type.^*17 By the 1970s, this impersonal serial form had also been received within Minimal and Conceptual art.^*3 Struth learned this discipline of comparison while keeping both his subjects and his photographic rules open to change. His 1976 street grid preceded his knowledge of the Bechers’ work, and he later said that although their comparative method interested him, blast furnaces and water towers were not his subject.^*14 This helps explain why the Museo del Prado acknowledges the influence of typological procedure while distinguishing Struth’s work from a strict, inventory-like Conceptual system.^*16

The distinction lies in how photographic rules function. The Bechers maintained a consistent rule so that many industrial structures could be compared. Struth changes the rule according to the question: an empty, centered street; a frontal family portrait; a large museum picture containing painting and viewer at once; a scientific facility rendered with enough precision to preserve the dense apparatus. What he inherited was less the Bechers’ appearance than the habit of designing photographic conditions for comparative thought. The Städel Museum’s reconsideration of the “Becher school” as something more diverse than a single shared style reinforces this distinction.^*15

Atget, Evans, and Urban Photography

The Met explicitly connects Leonard Street to the urban architectural photography of Charles Marville and Eugène Atget, predecessors who long predate the Bechers.^*4 Marville worked on a municipal commission to record Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, photographing both the old city slated for demolition and new urban infrastructure.^*24 Over more than thirty years, Atget accumulated photographs of Parisian buildings, streets, shops, and gardens as “old Paris” changed under modernization.^*21 From this lineage, Struth drew a method of registering historical change through specific architecture and streets, treating the city as an accumulation of material evidence.

The connection to Walker Evans is more direct. Struth has said that in an Evans photograph he could examine cars, houses, and terrain in sequence and analyze a place by relating those details to his own experience.^*14 Evans described American society through roadside architecture, signs, inexpensive shops, houses, and other vernacular environments; his clear photographic language later influenced the Bechers as well.^*22 Struth was also studying Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore on his own during the 1970s, so the Bechers were not his only route into urban photography.^*18

In its account of Times Square, New York, The Met names Atget, Marville, Sander, and Evans as part of Struth’s historical lineage. It also distinguishes their records of modernization within particular cities or nations from Struth’s attention to cities whose cultural boundaries have become more complicated through globalization.^*31 Perenyei further argues that the one-point perspective of the early streets does more than inventory buildings: it carries the eye into depth and anticipates compositional strategies used later in the museum photographs.^*26 Struth’s street pictures therefore join a photographic history of reading society through the surfaces of places with a perspectival organization of the frame rooted in his training as a painter.

Sander and Family Portraits

August Sander was an important precedent in New Objectivity for the Bechers.^*3 Family Portraits sets a different problem from Sander’s social types. Recent criticism distinguishes Sander’s effort to organize society through occupations and classes from Struth’s lack of an encyclopedic classificatory plan; Struth concentrates on the way a particular family presents itself in a public image.^*20 The High Museum’s account of The Richter Family 1 likewise recalls the frontality of Sander and the Bechers while drawing attention to the parents’ and children’s postures and to paintings in the room as signs specific to this family.^*23 Guggenheim Bilbao describes Struth’s family portraits as the result of formal sessions in which subjects knowingly face the camera, recording both individual characteristics and the structure of the family as a group.^*38

Through Fried’s argument, the distinction also concerns what posing means. Struth’s families know they are being photographed, face forward, and collectively participate in how they will appear. Yet resemblances of face and body, degrees of physical closeness, differences in seated height, and interpersonal distance contain features that exceed the self-image they intend to construct.^*28 Because the photographer does not stage a psychological narrative, the consciously arranged family image can be compared with what the camera records through bodies and placement. A similar attitude carries into the museum photographs: Struth records how viewers actually stand and look instead of inventing motives for their behavior.

Museum Photographs and Contemporary Art

Struth’s significance within contemporary art is tied to a change in how photographs were exhibited. During the 1970s, Conceptual art frequently used photography for documentation, information, and classification. From the late 1970s through the 1980s and after, works by Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Struth, and others increasingly occupied large sections of museum and gallery walls and invited prolonged attention as single pictures. Fried discusses this development in terms of tableau photography.^*28 Perenyei likewise places Struth within the process through which photography entered contemporary art as an autonomous pictorial field while intersecting with film, performance, sculpture, and painting.^*26

When Struth stayed in New York in 1978, this shift in photography coincided with active debates about museums, authorship, and representation. Perenyei identifies the institutional critique associated with Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and the circle around October as part of this historical setting.^*26 Having learned in Düsseldorf to compare and analyze photographs, Struth photographed New York streets in an environment where questions about what photographs record were increasingly joined by questions about where and how they are seen.

Museum Photographs brings these two developments together. Its subject is the museum that displays old paintings as “masterpieces” before large numbers of visitors. The finished photographs, meanwhile, approach two meters in scale and return to museum and gallery walls to be viewed in a manner associated with painting. A photograph of people looking in a museum thus returns to the museum, where a new audience stands before it. MoMA’s On the Edge catalogue explains that viewers of Struth’s photographs may recognize their own activity in the visitors depicted within the frame and become conscious of what they themselves are doing there.^*29

The relation to painting is equally concrete. MoMA characterizes Struth’s aims as investigative while describing his compositional organization as “painterly”.^*29 Their relation to painting lies in Struth’s understanding of perspective, figure placement, and the organization of the whole pictorial field, which he applies to configurations produced by actual streets and viewers. In Museum Photographs, the calculated placement of figures inside a history painting shares a plane with contemporary visitors who have gathered before it. The story composed in the painting’s past can therefore be compared directly with present-day acts of viewing.

For its 2002 retrospective, The Met introduced Struth as an important artist in bringing photography into the mainstream of contemporary art and giving it a scale and ambition comparable to major art of the past.^*37 The point extends beyond the physical size of the print. Struth demonstrated that photography could retain its capacity to record while addressing the history of painting, the museum as an institution, the viewer’s body, and contemporary society within a single work. At the moment when photography came to share exhibition space with painting and sculpture, Museum Photographs made that new position of photography one of its own subjects.

How Struth Differs from Gursky, Ruff, and Höfer

The Düsseldorf School is often treated as a shared style, but The Met cautions against simply equating Struth with Andreas Gursky. Both work at large scale and photograph social spaces around the world; Struth emphasizes how history and individual lives are joined within places, while Gursky places greater weight on the collectives and systems that organize production and consumption.^*3 Thomas Ruff turned more directly toward the systems and technologies through which photographs become images, while Candida Höfer pursued sustained observation of public interiors. The Städel Museum’s reconsideration of the Becher class as a setting from which markedly different forms of photography emerged makes the same point.^*15

Nana Last reads Struth’s work from 1978 to 2018 through three stages—“archive / matrix / assembly”—and treats the series as a development in which methods learned in one body of work alter what becomes possible in the next.^*32 From this perspective, the abstract word “institution” is not enough to connect the empty streets, families, museums, forests, and technological sites. To learn about society, Struth compares architecture in the streets, studies the placement of people within families, brings paintings and viewers into one museum image, creates forests in which analysis itself becomes difficult, and photographs the technological apparatus in which human decisions have taken material form. Each time he reconsiders where to place the camera, whether to include people, how much detail to preserve, and how large the photograph should be. The 2002 retrospective catalogue similarly includes Charles Wylie’s “A History of Now,” Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund’s “The Space of History,” and Ann Goldstein’s “Portraits of Self-Reflection,” examining urban photographic history, history and space, and portraiture across Struth’s work.^*34