Thomas Struth: Making Time

by Estrella de Diego (contributor), Thomas Struth (Photographer)

Thomas Struth's most recent project, "Making Time," was exhibited at the Prado, Madrid, in the winter and spring of 2007, and is now compiled in this handsome catalogue from Turner. Making Time continues Struth's established work on the subject of public art venues, and consists of photographs depicting the Prado's famous collection and its visitors, photographs that were displayed throughout the Prado during his exhibit, as part of the museum's current ambition to open up fresh perspectives on its holdings. Over the course of two years, Struth made more than 400 images in and around the Prado, showing an "inhabited" public space, and highlighting the interactions between the exhibited paintings and their viewers. This volume also marks the first presentation of Struth's earlier work, from the spring of 2005, on Velázquez's great "Las Meninas" (1656), itself a classic study of spectatorship. The result is a multilayered dialogue between Struth, the Prado, its collection and its visitors.

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007

Reviews

[اليازية خليفة · Rating 5 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب، في جزئية النص آخره، تستحق الدراسة.

بل أنا أوصي بكل مهتم بالفنون والمتاحف، وكل من ينوي استكمال دراسته العليا في أحد هذه المجالين أن يطلع على نص الكتاب.

ممتاز

[Sadie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And because this is about time - the tension between past, present and future - Struth's viewers solicitously fill the museum's uninhabited galleries, foreshadowing those to come. He has filled those galleries with words, footsteps, adolescent laughter, notebooks that fall down and glances that have yet to happen. Spectators to be, who - and therein lies the paradox - existed in another time and place and look at us now, with their curiosity, thinking of their own personal Icaruses. And this must be how the thoughts described by Proust were, too. The thrill he must have felt before Ruskin's avid gaze, the eye that sees because it sees where what is visible has yet to exist. An eye that renders the invisible visible and reveals, like Thomas Struth's eye, the richest reality in this walk through the Prado, the other Prado, so close and so unexpected; just as these photos by Struth are also other photos, returning to what, unbeknownst to them, was the home of their feelings, inaugurating the habitability of the new Prado, in the meantime." - from essay by Estrella de Diego.