Thomas Struth Books

A central figure of the new wave of German photography that first arrived in the 1970s, Thomas Struth has continued to impact the world of photography with his large-scale museum interiors, portraits, and architectural photography. Struth has emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art's critique of the subject and the socio-economic order by creating images that are at once visually arresting and subtly political. This new monograph presents another facet of Struth's oeuvre, assembling a series of flower photographs produced for a unique project. In 1991, Struth was commissioned to decorate a new hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. He decided to produce a two flower photographs and a landscape for each of the 37 sickrooms. The flower photographs were to be hung on the wall behind the bed, the landscape on the opposite wall. With this project, Struth hoped to bring the captivating environment of the Winterthur area into the interior space of the hospital, connecting patients to the outside word. The images for the hospital shift between documentary objectivity and painterly qualities of light and shadow. Beautifully reproduced here, these pictures brilliantly and colorfully synthesize a tradition of landscape photography that includes Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and August Sander with the tradition of 19th century flower and landscape painting.

Thomas Struth (b. 1954) is one of the most compelling artists using photography today. Coming to prominence in his native Germany in the 1970s, Struth captured the atmospheric power of the contemporary urban landscape in his early black-and-white works. With an intent gaze and exacting lens, Struth expanded his range to include color portraits, bringing a unique psychological precision to the tradition of portraiture.Perhaps Struth's best-known works are his majestic, large-scaled museum photographs depicting visitors to some of the world's great museums and buildings, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, the Accademia in Venice, and the Pantheon in Rome. These captivating photographs not only transport us to the place depicted, they also provide a chance to reexamine our own selves looking at art. Continuing his interest in series, Struth has recently created expansive works based on the natural world, often training his camera on a particular contemporary melding of nature with technology and architecture.This handsomely designed and produced volume is the most comprehensive book to date on the photographs of Thomas Struth and accompanies a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. Engaging essays by well-known photography and art experts chronicle Struth's career and situate his work in the context of the history of photography and its rise in contemporary art.

Each of Thomas Struth's "paradises" is a piece of nature devoted to a specific overarching theme. In his photographs measuring up to 9 by 11 feet in size, Struth draws the viewer into the magical semidarkness of forests and jungles, the impenetrable and yet bright green of the trees, bushes, and undergrowth, of tropical plants, rampant jungle vegetation, and mossy brooks. Struth found his paradises in China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and Germany, where he discovered suitable material in the forests of Bavaria. This book contains the entire series of 25 photographs as full-page plates. In their essays, psychologist Ingo Hartmann and art historian Hans Rudolf Reust each shed light from their own particular angle on our current understanding of so-called untamed nature, its exploitation and mystification, not to mention as a basis for utopias.