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Thomas Struth: Strangers and Friends
In his first book to be published in the United States, German photographer Thomas Struth explores the social space and mental state of the modern metropolis. Thomas Strangers & Friends covers the entire trajectory of Struth's career and his work in several subject matters, including his restrained and rigorous architectural photographs, intimate family portraits, and frenzied museum interiors.
A former student of artist Gerhard Richter and of photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, Struth began in the early 1980s to make steely black and white photographs of deserted city streets and decaying buildings in a restrained and rigorous style that seemed to underscore his debt to his teachers. In recent years, his work has diversified in subject, scale, and color to embrace increasingly ambitious subjects and challenging locations. Struth has extended his urban investigation to the inhabitants and interior spaces of the city, from Naples to Tokyo to Chicago to Berlin, portraying the relationships, conscious and unconscious, through which we build and abandon our identities in a world of transitory physical and social structures.
Thomas Strangers & Friends continues a notable tradition of books by German photographers from August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch to Hilla and Bernd Becher. It is the most complete presentation of Struth's work to date, following Unconscious Places (1987) and Museum Photographs (1993).
A former student of artist Gerhard Richter and of photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, Struth began in the early 1980s to make steely black and white photographs of deserted city streets and decaying buildings in a restrained and rigorous style that seemed to underscore his debt to his teachers. In recent years, his work has diversified in subject, scale, and color to embrace increasingly ambitious subjects and challenging locations. Struth has extended his urban investigation to the inhabitants and interior spaces of the city, from Naples to Tokyo to Chicago to Berlin, portraying the relationships, conscious and unconscious, through which we build and abandon our identities in a world of transitory physical and social structures.
Thomas Strangers & Friends continues a notable tradition of books by German photographers from August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch to Hilla and Bernd Becher. It is the most complete presentation of Struth's work to date, following Unconscious Places (1987) and Museum Photographs (1993).
106 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
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November 5, 2007
yes. a photograph of a person standing in a museum looking at a seurat will stop you. as light filters through dirty windows with shutters and falls on you. sitting on a couch in a city one thousand miles away from your home. in quiet morning light. with the steam rising out of your ceramic coffee cup. you will stop. and sense the moment. and what is going on through the mind of the person in the photograph. and here you are. on a couch. in filtered light. remembering the time you stood in the metropolitan with the person you loved, the person you were so in love with at the time just off your elbow staring with tears streaming down her face and when you said whats the matter, she just nodded at the painting. some edward hopper whose title i forget. this is what these photographs do. they bring out the ghosts of your life and set them there on your hardwood floors before you've had your morning coffee.
Displaying 1 of 1 review