Thomas Struth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Geldern, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
I wanted to make photographs in which everything was so complex and detailed that you could look at them forever and never see everything.
In certain cases, I asked people to stay fixed in their position, but the effect was already lost. Those photographs don’t work, because photography is so sensitive a medium that one can’t lie using it.
(On his “Museum Photographs”)
I’m interested in photographs that have no personal signature.
[I]n general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence.
The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.
The image of an empty landscape accommodates the medium of photography in so far as it always involves the present, despite being historically referential.
The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.
The word “series” is a diminutive attachment. A series is something that pretends as if one picture has no value and you need the series to give it that value. You wouldn’t say, for instance, that James Joyce wrote “a series of books.”
