Paradise & Dystopia
For more than three decades, the German artist Thomas Struth has made photographs of startling clarity and precision. He approaches his subjects—New York streetscapes and South Korean skylines, German families and Queen Elizabeth II, the Louvre and Disneyland—with the objective eye of a journalist and the meticulous composition of a painter. Associated with the Düsseldorf School of Photography, which emerged in Germany, in the 1970s, under the teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth’s work is also connected to the psychological depth of August Sander’s portraits and the conceptual rigor found in the paintings of Gerhard Richter, his former mentor. Struth’s recent book Nature & Politics (2016) extends his fascination with natural landscapes into a critique of human engagement with the planet, looking at the built environment.
On an uncharacteristically warm day last October, the photographer and writer Aaron Schuman visited Struth at his second-floor Berlin studio, overlooking the leafy banks and calm waters of the Spree River. Several studio assistants worked at their respective monitors; one table revealed scale models of art institutions around the world—including MAST Foundation, in Bologna, Italy, where Struth’s touring exhibition Nature & Politics opened earlier this year. Together, Schuman and Struth discussed technology, animals, and how climate change might open the door to collective effort.
The connection between the “goal” or the “target” and yourself was fascinating. I thought about the camera as the ultimate pointing of the bow.
Thomas Struth: I’m sorry I’m a little bit late—I’ve just come from a funeral.
Aaron Schuman: I’m sorry to hear that. Were you close to the person?
: She was a neighbor who lived in our building, upstairs. She’d just turned fifty, and was the mother of two kids. She was East German—very sporty, very active, and was kind of a life force. My experiences with many people who were born in East Germany is
