Thomas Struth: “Il Duomo di Milano” 1998, C – print, Format: 187.60 x 245,7 cm. Copyright © Thomas Struth. Ask for price.
German photographer Thomas Struth is among the artists from the celebrated Düsseldorf School who studied under conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s and 1980s. Their rigid, deadpan style of uniform picture making proved a rich starting point, and in maturity Struth’s work excavates the nature of photography itself. His Portraits series contains the artist’s psychologically loaded frontal images of his human subjects. In the words of curator Weski, Struth’s camera is applied like “a two-way mirror,” reflecting both the photographer and his view of the subject with us, the viewer, as the third partner. Dubbed “subconscious places” by Thomas Struth, his city roads, with their austerity and vanishing point perspective, convey multiple layers of history as well as the “photographic moment.” Museum Photographs, with its images of people viewing works of art in museums around the world, explores photography’s rivalry with painting as well as issues like how art changes by being in a museum.