Thomas Struth style and facts
Thomas Struth is a German photographer born in 1954 in Geldern. He trained at the Düsseldorf’s Künstakademie from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting with Peter Kleemann and Gerhard Richter. Thomas Struth than socialized with Bernhard and Hilla Becher's photography, where since in the late 1950s, took on the project of creating a systematic archive of anonymous industrial buildings of Germany. He ranks today among the foremost exponents of contemporary German photographers.
Thomas Struth’s work is characterised by a refusal to indulge in the spectacular. There's nothing unusual in the way the photographs are made. The artist purposely does not focus on anything in the field of vision of the photograph, everything is sharp, nothing blurred. This reinforces and contributes to creating a strong neutral effect.
“Photographs that impress me have no personal signature”. He's not looking for aestheticism. The framing and the composition in his photographs never lead the gaze to any formal or substantive motif. His work is a sensitive and ample vision of reality without any artificial techniques. This doesn’t divert viewers from the real meaning that the photograph is trying to communicate, but instead emphasizes the apparent simplicity of his approach, which is based on a balanced combination of analytic power and visual insight.
Thomas Struth has explored a large variety of subjects over the years which are mainly cityscapes, landscapes, portraits or group portraits, church and museum interiors and flowers. In analysing these different themes, it appears that we can find a common feature linking all these works all together. It is an inquiry into the relationships between men and time. His images are presented as huge, glossy prints, many of them the result of years of planning, thought and consideration, shooting on a plate camera with large format film. 
His style is noticed as art photography, in the sense that it presents scenes of deliberately composed cultural heritage sites, museums and technological landscapes, which both require and demand contemplation. His work is anti-photojournalism in some senses, and is diametrically opposed. Some of his pictures take him years to make, a result of long periods of research and reflection. Yet he also presents images that show obstruction (difficult to see) and that touch on issues that, ultimately, the photogrpaher `Sean Smith’s` work also leads to.
The works show the awe that art can inspire on peoples faces, without revealing the object they are looking at, and are evidence to Struth’s continuous interest in places of culture around the globe.
Paradise series /Thomas Struth
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Thomas Struth has explored landscape photography. Seemingly a counterpoint to the images of the streets Indeed, one could argue that the urban landscapes refer to history. When researching his work you can identify the texture of the urban culture, traumatic events such as war, and the economic crisis or prosperity. His landscape images constitute an opposition between human activities and lives which have a start and an end and a timelessness of nature. When viewing Struth's other work, there`s nothing out of the ordinary in the landscapes. The artist presents us with nature ,a source of calm and consolation. He uses colour to render the infinite chromatic range of the vegetation and earth in a soft fused light. Still in comparison to the urban views, I think he was portraying his nature landscapes as a lighter concept as he wanted to relate back to history’s oppression. For instance, in the Paradise series, Struth celebrates the landscape, where he described the forests and jungles of a seemingly Eden-like natural state.
I think when viewing his series of `paradise` he was trying to address something which has a larger scale, a larger value than the specific details or locations shown. The photographs ultimately had to be driven by interests on a more general level. I think in relation to his other works, Thomas has chosen a very spontaneous idea, but once started the images were shown within a larger exhibition context. He realized that one of the abilities was to confine the individual in a meditative space. After researching I learnt there's no political or social context to the images, just his own experience.
`Paradise` consists of twenty five photographs. Intuition is an old world, but many things sprout from inner processes and needs and then take on a form. His approach to the jungle pictures might be said to be new, in that his initial impulses were pictorial and emotional, rather than theoretical.
The photographs were taken in the country's: Australia, Japan and china as well as in California woods, which contain a wealth of delicately. This made it almost impossible especially in large formats, to isolate single forms. The jungle pictures emphasize the wilderness, because of their brightly coloured features and power over land. Thomas Struth believed `Paradise` numbers 9 and 4 could be understood as membranes for medication. They present a kind of empty space, entitled to elicit a moment of stillness and internal dialogue. You have to be able to enjoy this silence in order to communicate with yourself and eventually with others”.
I think Thomas Struth did not want to portray a specific place, or forest. Instead he wanted and tried to communicate what once was the world. He also avoids pictures that would evoke exotic fantasies or look like botanical gardens. He doesn't even see images as depictions of nature. He think its about the experience of time as well as a certain humility in dealing with things.
The images are a detailed presentation of nature, with no human presence. they seem the opposite of his signature cityscapes and evince a kind of lush calmness that borders on the Romantic. Like much of his work, they are oddly disorienting in their clarity and detail. "I wanted to make photographs in which everything was so complex and detailed that you could look at them forever and never see everything," he says.
Between 1995 and 2003 Struth produced a series of photographs featuring groups of people gathered at emblematic locations, whether as tourists or as pilgrims. Again created throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas, colour photographs of 2010 that are up to 4 metres long record the structural intricacy of remote techno-industrial and scientific research spaces, such as physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and other edifices of technological production. He now focus's exclusively on the experience of proximity and nowadays sees the human as a consumer and therefore an instrument of a global economic mechanism.
Thomas Struth, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, 1999
This photo is an imposing rocky granite mountain located in Yosemite National Park, and has been photographed time and time again by hordes of tourists and masters of photography. Thomas Struth portrayed the rock formation from the road, the place that, as we see in the photograph, is also the place where many visitors stop their car and look at the mountain. Unlike most photographers, Struth chooses not to obliterate the road and the cars. They might not seem to belong to the pristine beauty of nature but they enabled tourists to get a fast and easy access to it. I like how Thomas has considered the lighting, how it must be harsh in the foreground but the sun must be directly overhead, this helps emphasize height of the subject (rocky granite mountain), suggesting power and control over the land.
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