Under the Surface

Abstract

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010 Whitechapel Gallery London, England July 6-September 16, 2011 Thomas Smith's interest in photography's mediation of our understanding of the world was immediately evident in his retrospective at London's Whitechapel Gallery, the first solo show of the German photographer's work in the United Kingdom. The gallery space was partitioned to create a narrow passage that forced an up-close-and-personal encounter with the museum visitors captured in the life-size Audience 06, Galleria dell Accademia Florence (2004)--producing a self-conscious identification with the spectators displayed in the work. Some are caught in the act of looking, gazing in awe at objects that are always just out of the frame. Other seem ditracted or even disinterested, like the central couple frozen in the self-conscious pose of a Manet painting recalled by the photograph's composition. Few, if any, return the gaze of Struth's camera, the unseen recorder of the spectacle of spectatorship. Strut's exploration of the facts and fictions of photographic vision and its impact on what we see--and know is perhaps unsurprising, given his training at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf during the 1970s. Having studied painting with Gerhard Richter, Struth went on to study photography with Hilla and Bernd Becher, and the impact of both disciplines comes to bear on his own work's combination of painterly scale with the unmanipulated objectivity that ran as a thread through (he various series on view at Whitechapel. Spanning his career to date, from the early black-and-white cityscapes of the late 1970s to the vast expanse and almost infinite detail of the recent color scenes of global urban sprawl, jungle thickets, and contemporary industry, the capacity of Struth's photographs to reveal the details of the world became ever more complex. In his early shots, European cities are lent an ordered familiarity through the uniformity of the single-point perspective contrived in images of their postwar streets. The painstaking staging of the camera in Milan Cathedral (facade) (1998: brings home its majesty, filling the frame with an undistorted, full-frontal elevation of the building's facade impossible to the unassisted eye. In later series, unseen spaces are opened up to show the workings of contemporary technology. The unimaginable intricacy of wires, ducts, and machines glimpsed in Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral (2008). or Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X, Detail Max Planck IPP, Greifswald (2009) manifest a technological sublime in all its shiny, fetishized glory. While the photographs are often undeniably beautiful in their realization, a documentary film accompanying the show revealed Struth's intention to use them to expose the ugly corners repressed in the modern world. …