Thomas Struth, Pantheon (Rome), 1990
Review by Chloe Pantazi
In her essay, On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote, ‘To collect photographs is to collect the world.’ For German photographer, Thomas Struth, collecting photographs is more a way to collect the art world. It is a collection of the art world, of sorts, charted in the recent exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery and the first UK retrospective of Struth’s career – one that spans 30 years.
A large body of Struth’s work depicts world-renowned art and sites of cultural attraction across the world, from the Pantheon to the British Museum and the National Gallery. Though these works are photographs of the spectacular per se – insofar as they are pictures of art –Struth does not photograph spectacles. Rather, he photographs the spectator; their reaction, pose, body language, facial expression (and most of the time, the back of someone’s head) are all captured by the camera lens, thereby turning the lens, and the onus, from the art back onto us: the viewer. In this respect, Struth’s works are really photographs of people very similar to ourselves; museumgoers that pay to see art, that want to stand in front of images and marvel at them, who believe they can learn something from art or at least appreciate it in the purely aesthetic sense. The beauty of Struth’s photographs essentially rests in their reflective nature; each of his photographs are essentially mirrors. Struth’s photographs of people looking at art have the profound power to transform looking itself into an art form and to question our habits as increasingly self-conscious viewers.
Aside from these pictures of celebrated art, other photographs featured include family portraits and street shots of seemingly invisible cities in which people are eerily omitted altogether. A far remove from his more popular photographs of art viewers, the street snaps are an intriguing part of the exhibition that might be interpreted as Struth’s more daring work; pictures that, like blank canvases, document emptiness with barren buildings and streets that leave one wondering where all the people went – perhaps to an art gallery? These city pictures, especially those of famously fast-paced cities like New York and Paris, stand as a sharp antonym to the common metaphor of city as living and breathing body. These empty, but incredibly full, photographs represent Struth’s own photographic footnotes of various international cities and the most striking part of the exhibition.
While Struth’s exhibition travels from one extreme to another – images of ghost town cities juxtaposed with those of crowded galleries – the collection of such pictures bears to mind Sontag’s argument that ‘Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its inquisitive mood.’ Struth’s photographs are exactly this: ‘experience captured’; be it the experience of a lone flâneur in a lone city, the onlooker at a bustling museum full of other onlookers, or the photographer at large, observing the world at an arm’s length.
