Thomas Struth’s identity issues

Wish Magazine, The Australian

7 September 2012

The prolific German photographer on time travel, violence and
“the cultivation of awareness”.

Berlin is a city of untold artists, wannabe artists and people who spend their days draped across chairs in coffee shops and bars scheming up notional "art projects". Among the city's few undisputed global artworld stars is the photographer Thomas Struth. And yet he is not, in anything but the most trivial sense, a Berliner.

Struth, 58, moved to the German capital from Dusseldorf just a couple of years ago. While he lives in an apartment in the elegant suburb of Charlottenberg and works from a spacious atelier beside the River Spree, several months of the year are spent in Manhattan with his American-born wife Tara Bray Smith. Struth's art also keeps him constantly on the hop. His radiant photographic studies of museums, churches and hot zones of cultural reverence - and the devotees who crowd them - have taken him and his camera to places such as Madrid, St Petersburg, Paris, Rome, Chicago, Palermo and, for an entire two months of one winter, Venice. In 1978, he shot a suite of Atget-like monochrome urban streetscapes in New York, continuing in this vein with serene yet slightly eerie unpeopled urban spaces in Tokyo, Dallas, Naples and Paris. A series of paradisical nature images involved journeys to Australia's Daintree, the jungles of Brazil and the forests of China, while his latest preoccupation - the intricate machinery of contemporary infrastructure and technology - lured him to Cape Canaveral in Florida, Buenos Aires and South Korea's Geoje Island. A series of family portraits, begun in the mid-1980s, bears the same stamp of geographical variation within a singular theme or motif, for these groups are shot in situ in places as far apart as Germany, North and South America and Japan.

Struth is constantly on the move. And yet his work, paradoxically, is insistently about place, milieu, genius loci. His generation was uprooted psychologically by the memory of war; he speaks of that trauma as "a wall" blocking him, as a child, from the German past. And it is tempting to view much of his oeuvre as a way of putting down roots in a deracinated world; of getting one's bearings through the power, impress and wonder of his selective and artfully composed large-format images. Of critical belonging. He describes it, in essence, as the cultivation of "awareness".

I recently made an appointment to meet Struth at his atelier in the Berlin suburb of Alt Moabit but when I press the doorbell of a rather faceless second-floor studio - most artists need to be seen in order to sell but there is nothing on the street flagging his presence - I find Struth has been called away on a personal matter and has completely forgotten. I take advantage of his absence to view some of his street scenes of Lima, which lie unframed on a series of workbenches in the soft, late afternoon light. They are being prepared for Unconscious Places, a book of his selected architecture and street photography from the mid 1970s to the present day. The most comprehensive survey yet of this strand of his work, with 220 plates and an essay by renowned American sociologist Richard Sennett, the book's publication chimes with an exhibition of Struth's street and architecture photography at the Venice architecture biennale (just opened and which runs until November).

On the book's cover is one of his New York photos from the late '70s, a now famous image of lower Manhattan under a drift of snow, the unified cast-iron streetscape offset by a new Fleetwood. The image seems to speak as much of time as of urban space. The viewer's imagination retro-fills what the eye cannot see. It peoples the absences of the empty street with presence: scenes from Serpico, Mean Streets, Annie Hall; flares, afros, '70s funk.

All around are sturdy bookcases housing reference works and an increasing number of monographs, books and essays - one published last year in The New Yorker on Struth himself. His office, which lies to one corner of the studio, is animated by a Juan Munoz sculpture from the exhibition Double Bind at the Tate Modern 2001. The place breathes a studious, contemplative, archival air.

After a quick telephone conversation between Struth and his secretary the broken appointment is remade for a Saturday breakfast. But when I arrive at the appointed hour and place he is nowhere to be seen. About half an hour later, Struth and Tara walk past in exercise gear with their dog and take the steps towards their door. I jump up from my table like a paparazzo cornering his quarry and Struth spins around. "Oh my god," he says. "You are ... " He and Tara take turns with their apologies, as if performing a duet. The artist offers his hand and further apologies, and leads me to the cafe. This rather farcical encounter tells me a few salient things about Thomas Struth: first, that he leads a busy, cluttered life and is at the same time rather self-absorbed; second, that he is a mensch. A good guy. He is genuinely embarrassed by the mix-up and wants to make things good.

Over coffee we begin talking about the New Yorker profile of 2011, written by the legendary Janet Malcolm. He is polite about the piece, which thrust him into Malcolm's company for a week. But I sense he feels it went slightly wide of the mark. Malcolm's peg was a photographic portrait by Struth of the Queen and Prince Philip that captures something of the brocaded gravitas of royalty while positioning the royal couple on a human plane: they are shot neither from above nor below but at an equable eye level. They gaze directly, the Queen a little uncertainly, into Struth's camera. The curious thing about Malcolm's decision to focus on this portrait, Struth offers, is that it represents "just a little flower on the tree of my work". How, then, would he describe the main trunk or spine of the work? "It is a feeling of identity with the time that you live in," he says, after pausing and glancing at his hands. The words are not coming easily, perhaps because we have jumped in at the deep end.

Struth speaks haltingly of a deeply felt need to "create an awareness" of "one's relationship to one's time"; and how this simultaneously involves the things that call us from the past and those that "call you from the future".

He feels as an artist a need to foster and intensify personal, historical and civic awareness. His political instincts were forged in the late '70s - a heady time for the European Left. But there is no singular message; no didactic hammer blow; no program. "Awareness itself can be transformative," he says.

As a student in the early '80s, he remembers joining the mass demonstrations against the installation on German soil of Cruise and Pershing missiles trained on the Eastern bloc. He recalls the Cold War and the Vietnam War and the great galvanising social issues of that time; and he laments the dimming of political awareness over the past few decades. "Even the Occupy Wall Street movement," he observes, "it just lasts six months or a year and then it's over. Everyone returns to their iPhones and Facebook. People are so distracted, so individualistic." He is galled by the destructive excesses of the finance sector and various insults to the global ecosystem.

Struth's project is now, as it has always been, social; in the broadest sense, political. "If that's not part of it, it wouldn't matter to me," he says in a firm and forceful tone. "OK, so it's in a more beautiful dress. It's not banners that hang down from buildings and not political posters, and it's certainly more expensive than you would think of as politically aware art. But if it doesn't contain political passion and empathy it doesn't mean anything to me."

There is a genial directness and sincerity to his manner. In photographs he is often bearded but on the day we meet he is clean-shaven. His slightly triangular face is calm, there is no pantomime repertoire of expansive facial or hand gestures and his conversation, in English, is deliberate and without flourish. And yet his hazel eyes, which are as large and tranquil of those of courtly figures in the mosaics of Ravenna, are powerfully expressive. Those eyes may be a camera shutter, recording everything, but they are also a window and they hide nothing.

Struth entered the art academy of Dusseldorf as a 19-year-old and trained initially as a painter, for a time under Gerhard Richter. But he showed more promise as a photographer, was less interested in painting his soul than the search for meaning in public spaces, and two years later began shooting his first street scenes in Dusseldorf with a 35mm camera. From that time he has done much to popularise photography's artistic claims, especially in the crystalline super-sized format (his recent royal portrait was exhibited at 1.4m by 2m). Among his formative influences at the art academy were Ernst and Hiller Becher, around whom constellated what has become known as the "Dusseldorf school of photography". Struth's artistic imagination still bears the influence of the Bechers' fondness for coolly observed objects of industry. Perhaps as a result of this artistic provenance his work is often described as rational, objective, intellectual, sociological, and it has proved a magnet for scholars and theorists who approach it with the armoury of specialist language.

The artist, though, is keen to stress the warmer emotional quality of his work. "I'm a very passionate person," he tells me. "I feel a lot of emotion about the things and the problems that matter to me. I'm in love with my subject matter." Struth offers these comments as a corrective to those who observe a cold magisterial eye guiding his work. "Some people," he continues, "don't have an open door to allow them to see it [the emotional quality]." At the same time, he concedes, it's a difficult subject. "Art historians don't write about emotions; it's novel territory. But one of the main questions for any artist has to be: why do you start with certain kinds of representations? What connects you to the material world and the material representation?" The answer to these questions, he believes, lies in the artist's emotional world and in the "dynamic of the unconscious". His earliest street scenes were an attempt to probe what he calls "the common unconscious. It was my starting point."

Probably his most celebrated photographs, however, are those of museum, church and temple interiors; of artworks and art gallery goers; of tourists and cultural pilgrims. Taken with large-format view cameras - Struth worked with either an 4in x 5in Linhof, an 8in x 10in Phillips and Sons, or an 13cm x 18cm Plaubel - these deeply resonant images explore the connections, and in some cases lack of them, between the viewer and the object of veneration. Struth refers to this theme as a form of "time travel". It connects his own viewers with those depicted in the photograph, and by a process of suggestive regress also summons up the spectre of the audience intended by the painter some 500 years earlier, the Old Master himself, his influences and his milieu. He makes his choices carefully.

He is not simply interested in paintings and their viewers but a particular painting. At the most basic level, these are "paintings that I like and find interesting. They also usually involve some kind of human narrative. Something like Gericault's Raft of the Medusa works very well. There is an emotional connection with the audience."

Struth, one of three siblings, was born in 1954 in the small town of Geldern, close to Dusseldorf where he was to later live and study, and less than an hour by car from the Dutch border. His father, a banker, fought with the German forces on the Russian front; his mother was a ceramicist with a keen interest in the arts. If the father was damaged by his wartime experiences he never let on: the recent past, for most of his life, was vacuum-sealed.

This troubled the young Struth, who learnt from quite a young age about the viciousness and mad ambition of the Nazi regime. "My father was not a violent man and never beat anyone," he recalls. "There was not even a slap on the face in our household. But even in the early '60s it was a violent society: there was a teacher who used to beat children who had not done their homework with a stick."

I mention to Struth that I was once strapped by nuns, in Australia, for playing an innocuous game. "Yes," he demurs. "Perhaps it was a generation thing. But violence in my world was visible. It was in the bombed-out cities. There seemed to be a total denial of normal human emotions associated with the war; with sadness or remorse.

"My father found it very difficult to talk about the war and it was not until his 82nd year, just before he died, that he told me some stories about that time. He was shot through his chest, the bullet passing less than an inch from his heart and passing out his back. Hospitalised in Poland, he was to board a hospital ship in Danzig but some instinct told him not to. That ship, with 5000 people on board, was torpedoed and sank. So many people died in that war. I could never understand why he could not just say, 'OK, I was shot and survived. I had a big trauma. But I'm sorry about what we did to the Jews. I'm sorry about what we did to the homosexuals. I'm sorry about all the deaths.' But he never said that."

Recently, though, Struth found himself voicing the apologies that he feels his father should have offered. It was at the home of Jewish friends of his wife Tara in Montana. "When we arrived, the mother cooked a German dish for us. Here we were in a Jewish household in America and they're cooking a German dish. I was overcome," he says, his eyes pooling with tears. "I felt so strongly. That day I said, for the first time, 'I'm so deeply sorry for what we have done.' This was six years ago. It took 50 years for me to say that."

It is tempting to read the artist's unpeopled landscapes - street scenes, technological infrastructure, remote forests - as a working-through of some deep-grained issue with the emotionally absent, uncommunicative father. But if some psychopathology of this sort were driving his art we would not have the piercingly candid family photographs; images that are almost voluble.

In his introduction to the new collection of Struth's architectural and urban photography, Richard Sennett, who has come to know the photographer personally, describes his working demeanour. "At work, Struth likes to chat, so much so that it seems he's forgotten he is there to work. Eventually he remembers - if, in fact, he ever did forget - gets under the cloth hood attached to his large-format camera and then, once he disappears from view, again nothing seems to happen; all at once the shutter clicks a few times and the session is over. The 'method', I came to realise, involves slowing time down for his subjects and for himself, taking his own good time to dwell in a scene before touching the camera."

Yet Struth works, he says, in a state of white-hot intensity, "like a hot-running computer". The greatest pressure he feels is the imperative to translate his own personal responses to the viewer. "A photograph is always an act of translation," he says. "Why did you choose this chair, naked body or sand dune, and not some other thing? You could ask five people to go out and photograph a Cadillac or a naked woman. They would all come back with something different and their choices would tell you whose eyes have looked at that subject matter."

One perhaps under-appreciated presence in Struth's mesmerising images is that of the photographer himself. His body of work, naturally, is an extended essay on ways of seeing; on ways of feeling, too. *