Thomas struth photographer biography

Renowned sociologist Richard Sennett's illuminating essay reveals how Struth's sober, lucid photography leads the viewer to create their own conclusions, rather than forcing a perspective. The resulting interplay among photographer, viewer, and landscape may hold the key to understanding how architecture affects our daily lives. Publisher : Publisher : D.

Since the s, Thomas Struth has been one of the best-known and internationally successful photographers of the German art scene. Struth studied painting under Gerhard Richter and photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher, a combination that decisively influenced his vision. This volume is a compilation of representative photographs from each series of works in Struth's oeuvre: street photographs from the s and '80s; empathetic portraits particularly of families ; large-format "museum photographs"; nature studies; jungle photographs New Pictures from Paradise ; and, from the latest series, images from the world of science.

As this compendium of his work shows, Struth has succeeded in setting new aesthetic standards thanks to his great precision, chromatic clarity, a sound sense of composition, and intellectual profundity. Publisher : Publisher : The Monacelli Press. Photographer Thomas Struth is one of the most acclaimed artists to emerge from Europe in the late twentieth century.

With great precision, clarity of color, and an unwavering instinct for composition, he addresses both important photographic motifs and informal, often little-known subjects. Struth characteristically treats the various aspects of his photographs in an even-handed way, a neutrality he also applies to the viewer, for he puts the viewing public on a par with his pictorial world.

Struth revisits many of his subjects, adding ever more layers of complexity and interpretation. Essays by renowned curators and critics complete this essential study of one of the world's major artists. Inspiring Portfolios. Janet Delaney. Tatsuo Suzuki. Karl Taylor. Call for Entries. Enter Competition. More Great Photographers To Discover. Philippe Halsman.

Philippe Halsman was born in Riga, Latvia and began his photographic career in Paris. Part of the great exodus of artists and intellectuals who fled the Nazis, Halsman arrived in the United States with his young family in , having obtained an emergency visa through the intervention of Albert Einstein. His incisive portraits appeared on covers for Life magazine, a record no other photographer could match.

In the early s, Halsman began to ask his subjects to jump for his camera at the conclusion of each sitting. These uniquely witty and energetic images have become an important part of his photographic legacy. Writing in , Halsman spoke of his fascination with the human face. Capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life.

With his courtly manners and European accent, Halsman also fit the popular stereotype at a time when Americans regarded psychology with fascinated skepticism. In fact, Halsman was proud of his ability to reveal the character of his sitters. As he explained, "It can't be done by pushing the person into position or arranging his head at a certain angle.

It must be accomplished by provoking the victim, amusing him with jokes, lulling him with silence, or asking impertinent questions which his best friend would be afraid to voice. Halsman asked Monroe to stand in a corner, and placed his camera directly in front of her. Later, he recalled that she looked "as if she had been pushed into the corner cornered with no way to escape.

During the hour I kept her cornered she enjoyed herself royally, and I. Yet Halsman deftly avoided any explicit representation of the true subject of the picture. Using the euphemistic language of the time, Halsman's assistant admired the photographer's ability to make "suggestive" pictures of beautiful women which still showed "good taste," emphasizing "expression" rather than "physical assets.

Discover this photographer. Michael Ackerman. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel. His family moves to New York in Lives and works in Warsaw. Since his first exhibition, in , Michael Ackerman has made his mark by bringing a new, radical and unique approach.

Thomas struth photographer biography

His work on Varanasi, entitled "End Time City," breaks away from all sorts of exoticism or any anecdotal attempt at description, to question time and death with a freedom granted by a distance from the panoramic — whose usage he renewed — to squares or rectangles. In black and white, with permanent risk that led him to explore impossible lighting, he allowed the grainy images to create enigmatic and pregnant visions.

Michael Ackerman seeks — and finds — in the world he traverses, reflections of his personal malaise, doubts and anguish. His last book "Half Life" has been published in by Robert Delpire. This show was presented, in particular, as part of the festival Banlieues Bleues and for the Rencontres d'Arles Prix Nadar, End Time City, Best Documentary of , photo-eye, Michael has been moving towards this erasure of geographical and other distinctions in his photographs for some time.

In all cases, there is surely a trajectory away from the constraints of a traditional documentary mode towards a very different way of getting at the world. Some notes about particular photos in Half Life: A family, seen on a decaying porcelain tombstone portrait - solarized by decades of exposure - is falling apart, as families do, is holding on together, as families do.

The shape of their little monument is uncannily like that of the Hotel Centrum on a later page, where such a family, had they existed in the same era, would not have been able to stay. The Centrum, a modern Polish megalith, floats absurdly in the frame, freed from all scale but heavy on the page. A naked man kneeling on a bed; we find him in supplication or some unspecific bondage.

He is trapped, caught between stations, and the terrible but accepted scratch lines on the negative make it feel like TV or video, as if the man is seen through some screen, receding. The stairs begin in Lodz but, according to the next page, pass a landing in Havana. A woman, naked, holds her arms against her torso. She looks up, somehow in simultaneous surprise and recognition.

At one point they were scattered throughout, at other times they fell together in a bloc, but in any case, the body of work, and the book as a whole, started to feel to me like they ran on rails in the snow, and the places and people within them were stops, things seen or felt in passing. Michael deeply loves the snow trains that cut archaically through Europe, especially through Eastern Europe, especially the overnight trains which he and I share as our transportation of choice.

This nothing in which things float is echoed in his prints, though the white is sometimes heavily vignetted, as if darkness wants in. Alternately, the backgrounds can be of total blackness, and then the subject radiates like a candle. But back to the snow trains, which often run through the most ignored and beautiful parts of cities, where commercial facades drop away like forced smiles into debris and frozen mud and warehouses, which then give way to fields.

Riding on one of these trains outside of Katowice, Poland en route to Paris, Michael spotted in the distance the warped row of dead train cars seen in the book. Desperate to photograph them, he guessed at their location and eventually returned. He got off at the closest stop, trudged through the snow, and found the trains, but approaching across a frozen field, camera in hand, his legs suddenly plunged through a chasm in the whiteness, a missing manhole cover.

Her bar was a special refuge, and though she was difficult, she truly took Michael in. For some moments however, they drew, or seemed to draw, terribly close, with alcohol as glue and pictures proof -- but of what… mutual need, eventual isolation, or the pendulum swing between the two… A bar is something like the center of an hourglass: at the top is time disappearing, and at the bottom, time spent.

But to those in the place, the regulars, the middle is the only thing apparent and there time has stopped. An interesting circumstance for others in the time-stopping business, and not just still photographers. Once again, suspension. Which also has a musical definition: The prolongation of a tone in one chord into the following chord, usually producing a temporary dissonance.

This prolongation of tone, an ongoing search, gives the work continuity, as does the dissonance, which can be restlessness or loss. The photograph is a pact: see you now, see you later, so long In the last few years, such goodbyes have given way to a series of welcomings, explorations of the concrete changes and dream states of immediate family, wife and child.

These pictures, deeply caring but by necessity fearless, reverberate with bluntness, warmth, shock, matter of fact erotics, and of course love, which when regarded honestly, includes a steamer trunk of contradictions. So, there is fear mixed in with the fearlessness, the joy includes some trepidation, the innocence is utterly real, but tangled and fleeting.

How disappointing it would be if a photographer so open to the wrenching truths of the world would suddenly pull all punches when faced with the most intimate situation of all. How unfortunate it would be, for all of us, if investigations of intimacy were left to the whitewashers and the advertisers, the puritans and the pornographers. In the year that followed he photographed various city locations including Wall Street, Soho, and Brooklyn.

Demonstrating his objective, documentary-like approach, the fruits of his scholarship were showcased at an exhibition in On completion of his scholarship, however, Struth left New York which he had found rather imposing as a city for Europe where he visited, and resided at, a number of locations. While in Europe, Struth started to expand his repertoire, producing photographs on aspects of culture, religion, and architecture.

In Struth visited Rome, photographing its architecture; and then Japan, where he began work on his Families portrait series He returned to Italy in , residing in Rome and Naples. While in Italy, he stayed with the photographer and Kunstakademie student, Janice Guy, and Giulia Zorzetti, a restorer of old paintings. Indeed his friend Guy became a sitter for the above-mentioned Families series.

In , Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterhur in Zurich, offered Struth the opportunity to take photographs for a hospital wing in Lindberg. Struth accepted the offer, producing photographs of flowers and landscapes. Remarkably different from his disassociated perspective of cities, Struth had demonstrated his latent versatility. He said of the experience: "It was good, I liked it.

I mean in the beginning, it was a strange thing because I was 39 when I started and I felt that it was very interesting to be a professor of photography because it sounds like a contradiction! His marriage also marked the point in his career at which he switched his focus from human nature and culture to complex manmade structures.

He produced photographs of structures that were marvelled at for their practicality, and which had hitherto never served any artistic purpose whatsoever. His new appreciation of the human ability to create extraordinary structures inspired Struth to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida twice and the NASA space museum. His visit to the NASA complex inspired him to call on many more areas in which new technologies were in the process of being created.

He decided thus to create an extensive document on technology to encompass research laboratories in other countries, including Germany, Israel, Argentina and Scotland. Marking a new turn in his artistic career in , Struth was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London to create a portrait of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The prospect was intriguing to him as he had previously shied away from photographing prominent people even though he was well known for his portraits of "ordinary" people.

Struth's experimentation with subject matter took a new turn in , when he was granted permission to photograph behind the scenes of Disneyland by the CEO Bob Iger. His focus on the theme park resulted in a series of "little worlds" that could sit alongside his photographs of the many cities he visited. Indeed, many of Struth's photographs of Disneyland do not reveal their recreational purpose at all.

Currently Struth lives and works between Berlin and New York. The power of Struth's photographic realizations are beyond doubt and wide-reaching in their influence. He was, moreover, instrumental in bringing a new scale to the photographic image and its elevated status as "Fine Art" was reflected in the unprecedented prices they commanded.

Indeed, through his skill of producing photographs on the scale of history painting, Struth presented works that could compete with the paintings hanging on the walls of national galleries. The colossal scale of Struth's work, combined with his fundamental desire to document the world rather that alter it, has had a great impact on contemporary photographers, and similarities with his work can be seen in the technique of Michael Wolf, and especially the latter's famous Corner Houses series.

Content compiled and written by Libby Festorazzi. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Important Art. National Gallery 1 San Zaccaria Audience 3 The Falletti Family Early Training and Work. Mature Period. Influences and Connections. These early works largely consisted of black-and-white shots of streets.

Skyscrapers were another feature of his work, with many of his photographs attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment. In the mids, Struth added a new dimension to his work when he started to produce family portraits, some of which are in colour and others in black and white. This was after a meeting with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann.

As a result, these works attempt to show the underlying social dynamics within a seemingly still photograph. Expanding the practice after living in Naples and Rome at the end of the s, he also photographed visitors of churches. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Recognition [ edit ]. Art market [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Publications [ edit ]. Public collections [ edit ].

References [ edit ]. The Art Story. Retrieved 28 July from www. Retrieved 18 January Retrieved 16 February Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 21 February The Metropolitan Museum of Art.