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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Photography Collection > New York Street Photography Thomas Struth (German, born 1954)Thomas Struth entered the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in 1973 and studied with Gerhard Richter and Bernd and Hilla Becher. In 1978 he received the New York Scholarship from the Kunstakademie and began his first series of photographing American and European cities. He taught photography from 1993 to 1996 and in 1997 was awarded the “Spectrum” International Prize for Photography, Stiftung Niedersachsen. These photographs document not only New York City in the late 1970s, but also the early phase of Struth’s career. Although Struth is best known for his almost life-size “Museum” pictures, in which he photographs visitors to public institutions, the early black-and-white photographs remain both powerful pictures in their own right and historical markers of a moment in the development of street photography, as it absorbed and transformed the various artistic movements of the 1960s and 70s. His city photographs reflect both the notion of art as social inquiry, as he sought to better understand people through their built environment, and the legacy of the Bechers, whose series of photographs of industrial and domestic structures relate (like those of Roy Colmer) to American minimalism and conceptual art. “For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process.” Thomas Struth Park Avenue, New York / Midtown, 1978 (printed 2002) 2 silver gelatin prints |
