Thomas Struth’s first museum exhibition was in Switzerland in 1987, at Kunsthalle Bern. The title was Unconscious Places. It consisted of long rows of small-format black-and-white photographs showing only streets. A row of facades to left and right, with a straight road down the middle, sometimes with a tramline disappearing into the distance. The images were structured in a way that could be read as geometrically stringent Rorschach tests in which the facades were mirrored on either side of the divide like a psychogram of society, with all the constructed, used, refurbished, visible aspects of a social structure reflecting the history of the people in those towns. Although there are hardly any people in these pictures, there is nevertheless an impression of looking only at something created by humans and by their will, their work, their building up and tearing down. The streets lead deep into the urban subconscious. The black-and-white helps us as viewers to see them as structures and to read them as maps. Thomas Struth went on to take photographs in more than fifty cities, widely mapping the materialisation of our existence and creating a portrait of built history.

Parallel to this, we find his Family Portraits. These are photographs with no escape route; the space or corner contains the family, grouped around a table, seated on sofas or formally grouped in front of the camera as an ensemble, like a family tree captured by the lens. Unlike the urban street photographs, these images seem almost confrontational. The camera is set up in front of the people, and the people respond to it by taking up position, leaning or supporting themselves, whether calmly, stiffly, relaxed or defiant, arms on knees or on the shoulders of others, with fathers and mothers arm in arm or reaching out, with hands in pockets, spread widely or clasped as though in prayer. A ballet of hands and gazes, framed and supported by bodies and furnishings. Yet at the same time, the rooms are the interiors of the streets, furnished and inhabited, enlivened by the signs and gestures of the family structure. The images are both subconscious and conscious family groupings whose signals give us, as viewers, and even more so as acquaintances and relatives, an insight into family relationships. His Museum Photographs are an extension of this into the public space. They tell of the way people interact in public and of their encounters with art and culture.

There is another such duality or dialogue amongst the groups of artworks in the oeuvre of Thomas Struth. His ‘Jungle Photographs’, which Struth himself describes as Paradise, coupled with the new ‘Technology and Science Photographs’, also form a contrasting pair. An initial comparison with another image, namely with Struth’s frontal image of Milan Cathedral, immediately highlights this contrast. Milan Cathedral is structured and organised with a stringent clarity that provides both order and orientation, giving us a sense of security. It offers us (or once did) a feeling of overarching organisation, guidance and structure, representing the divine order on earth, hewn firmly in stone. It intimates both a welcome and a home, even though its facade represents a massive demonstration of power and even though the doors in the image appear dark and forbidding. Even more strongly than the expansiveness of the Milan Cathedral, the Jungle Photographs seem to extend beyond the bounds of the picture, like an all-over in green. There appears to be no rational order here. Everything seems to grow and sprawl in all directions, with no discernible path or orientation. Nature in its most primordial form. Bright and radiant and green, it beckons us, only to swallow us up in sombre darkness the moment we seek to enter the chaos of nature. In this respect, both photographically and compositionally, there is neither motif nor visual order, but only an impenetrable overgrowth that blocks our retrospective view. Paradise lost? Paradise regained? We have an inkling here that Thomas Struth has deliberately lured us onto thin ice with his appealing imagery, only to undermine our sense of security, leaving us to our own devices and cast adrift with our own yearnings, fantasies and projections. We hesitate about whether to enter this world or stay outside. It is not clear where it might lead, whether it embodies truth or irony, or how literally or metaphorically it might be meant.

Many of the precisely composed science and technology images, some of them large-format, initially appear chaotic. For instance, in Measuring, Stellarator Wendelstein, Tokamak Asdex Upgrade, Laser Lab and Grazing Incidence Spectrometer we gaze into a tangle of cables, rods, plugs, metal lids, cutter tape and plastic covers. Unless we actually work in one of these fields, we can find neither rhyme nor reason in this unruly mess. And so we ponder, with both curiosity and caution, what these arrangements might possibly mean. They seem alien, other, unorderly, like his Paradise images. The difference is that we know it is not primordial nature we are looking at here, but that what we are seeing is instead the machinery, the contraptions and installations, of cutting-edge technology. We find ourselves faced with something akin to William Blake’s tiger, the windmills of Don Quixote, or one of Herman Melville’s iron animals, representing the mechanical outgrowths of human intelligence and creativity as they were symbolically described in nineteenth century literature. Rather than drawing closer to originary nature, we are gradually becoming distanced from it. We humans encounter our own technical and technological developments either euphorically, like Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto, or with the melancholy of Freud, who regarded all technological extensions of the human body and mind as prosthetics, describing them in terms of absence and loss. One hundred years later, we have come a great deal closer to this loss, which is a kind of loss of authority in the relationship between man and machine.

Here, Thomas Struth moves in realms and forbidden zones to which we do not normally have access. He shows us scientific, highly technological experiments, developments, research, calibrations and interventions that will at some point, directly or not, intrude into our lives and have an impact. One figurative example is the use of robots to undertake at times minimally invasive surgery on the human body. We submit our authority and our previously untainted bodies to science and surgical technology. The instruments pierce the outer layer of skin to invade the inner body and its workings. Endoscopies, monitored on a screen, allow us to see into the very utmost interior of the body, while connecting the body itself to the big machine and, with that, subjecting it to a new form of humility that shifts the relationship between man and machine still further. 

The thickets of the Paradise images rapidly reveal what they are on a purely descriptive level. Then they leave it up to us to deal emotionally and fictionally with the possibilities and abysses of the world they portray. The technology images, on the other hand, for all their seeming clarity, precision and balance,   never really satisfactorily inform us. These are worlds that remain unfathomable to us without explanations, credits or contextualisation – with the possible exception of the oil rigs and lower part of a space shuttle. Accordingly, they firmly fix and challenge our gaze as we struggle to understand and fathom them, and to compare the new with the familiar, with our own experience and knowledge, until we start to doubt our own eyes.

Meticulous, methodical and visually astute as ever, Thomas Struth has produced impressive images portraying the world of current research and cutting-edge technology. At the same time, his photographs exude a sense of the complexity, breadth and strength of the processes involved, as well as the power and politics of knowledge and action that underpin these projects. He deliberately unsettles us by putting these strangely distant worlds and the way we relate to them up for debate. With time, we may be able to discern individual aspects and bring them back into a recognisable part of our known world, but in the wider context of this new and alien otherness, where the hi-tech mills that power the contemporary and future world are concerned, all that remains to us is our immense and at times bemused astonishment.

It is for this reason that both Seascape, Donghae City and Acropolis Museum, Athens have been included in the exhibition in reference to nature and human history. As a reference to craftsmanship and the human capacity for highly developed artisanal skills and artistic precision, we are also screening the 2003 video installation Read This Like Seeing It for the First Time, which shows the meticulously orchestrated interaction between teachers and students in music tuition and demonstrates just what it  takes in terms of teaching and learning, giving and receiving, and absorbing. It is in our time, especially, while we are experiencing such a massive shift in the direction of robotisation of the labour market, that we should pay attention to this development and emphasise the achievements of which we, as humans, are capable.

Translated by Ishbel Flett