Thomas Struth

Again, I came across Thomas Struth when reading about Deadpan.

His origins are in the Dusseldorf school. He started his career in cataloguing people-less streets of major cities.

However in the late 80s he became interested in looking to record the way in people experience/view/interact with works of art. He started photographing people in art galleries, clandestinely. He then displayed these on a grand scale, in art galleries.

I think this an investigation into the act of observing art. Which when itself experienced causes the viewer to reflect on their own experience.

In the 2 photographs below the viewer is reflected in the art and vice-versa - in their clothing, stance, positioning etc. The 2 seem to merge.





I think the below photograph portrays another situation where viewing isn't so personal.



In later work he started to photograph from the perspective of the artwork. As with other Deadpan photographs. These are difficult to read what he's saying - if anything. They offer many readings.




I'm reminded somewhat of the photographs I took of the Mona Lisa room for my first Assignment. Not that I'm equating them obviously....

More recently he's taken a series of photographs of jungles. These photographs are immense in their unstructured detail. I quote here from the guardian:

"I wanted to make photographs in which everything was so complex and detailed that you could look at them forever and never see everything," he says. He has since noticed that people spend a lot of time "looking very quietly into the jungle pictures" and that there "is often an even more deeper silence than usual" around them. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/03/thomas-struth-interview-photography-whitechapel )

It must be difficult to compose photographs such as these. To fill the frame with something that looks right and is better than the angle 5 degrees to the left, or from 10 feet to the right. I bet they're very impressive when displayed in a gallery at full size.