Thomas Struth is a photographer who has expanded his subjects from deserted streets, family portraits, viewers inside museums, and tropical forests to scientific and technological facilities, making visible in large-format photography the structures of the institutions and the gaze that human beings have built. This page traces where the objectivity that came after the Becher school spread.
Struth photographs cities, museums, and scientific facilities not as the stage of an event but as institutions that already surround us. The point of this page is that he makes a photograph of the very passages through which human beings see the world.
This site does not display work images. Please see the official, museum, and publisher resources below.
Contents · Table of Contents
Seeing the city as the trace of institutions
In the early street photographs, the absence of people lets the traces of a city’s history, power, planning, and life appear as structure*2.
Photographing museum viewers
In Museum Photographs, by photographing people looking at works of art, he showed that the museum is a place that simultaneously produces the artwork, tourism, the body, and the institutional gaze*2.
Extending into scientific and technological facilities
In Nature & Politics he photographs the normally hard-to-see sites of advanced technology — CERN, space, medicine, industry, research facilities*1.
Struth is an artist who extended the objectivity that came after the Becher school beyond industrial typologies, into the visual structures of the city, the art institution, the family, and science and technology*1.
His photographs see society not as a dramatic event but as the institutional environment that already surrounds us*2.