Two near-life-sized photographs greet you to this survey of German artist Thomas Struth. It’s a pair of images in which tourists stare up with varying degrees of interest at something high above their heads. Of course, we’re implicated in their gormlessness merely by gawping at the gawpers, who are actually in Florence contemplating Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of ‘David’ at the Galleria dell’Accademia. But, ironically for their state of slack-jawed stupor, the gaudily dressed day-trippers, like the renaissance statue, are elevated to something like Goliaths.
There are more sights for tourists’ eyes here: a couple of cathedrals, a mountain, a Las Vegas theme park and numerous other museums, only many of these are emptied of human life by Struth’s brutalising, colossal compositions. Pinpoint sharp pictures surround you and crowd you in – even an extended Whitechapel Gallery struggles to contain these giant prints – but this is not interactive or relational art. It’s old-fashioned observation. Static vistas of Times Square, Notre Dame, the Forbidden City and Kennedy Space Center read like epic advertisements for a breathtaking, globalised world, especially Struth's rooftop view of Ulsan, a Korean megacity in the making (one that I’d never even heard of) that is seemingly ungoverned by the little people.
If there is one overriding theme here, it’s in the struggle between man and the manmade, between Struth and his camera. His studies of the mechanical gubbins of a particle accelerator or the space shuttle give those inanimate messes of cables a life of their own, independent of us. Our achievements in art, science and architecture are meant to outlast and dwarf us – even a mud-brick shanty growing out of a Lima hillside seems like a latter-day version of the Aztec ziggurats that once dominated this Peruvian landscape. Struth aims for similar cinema-worthy immersion into nature in his ‘Paradise’ series of jungle thickets, but in terms of detail or incident they are as forgettable as wallpaper.
Eventually we get to see Struth’s humbler beginnings: small format black-and-white landscapes, primarily of Düsseldorf streets receding to nothing (although it’s frustrating and wilfully obtuse not to have included any of his near-identical – but for this audience, surely more resonant – images taken in deserted London streets in the late ’70s). These exhaustive views of drab apartment blocks show the Becher effect on Struth, having been tutored by the same understated husband-and-wife team, Bernd and Hilla Becher, that also spawned such talented German photo-objectivists as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer. (Struth’s other famous teacher, the painter Gerhard Richter, is here too, portrayed en famille.) There’s nothing objective about Gursky’s heavy use of manipulation, of course, but Struth’s post-photographic erasures are fewer and more subtle, making him ultimately the better artist.
I believe that Struth’s photographs, like Gursky’s, work better uninhabited, or at least when the figures become subservient to their environment. Glimpsing reproductions in the press of the recent stiffly posed portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, taken by Struth for a Diamond Jubilee exhibition next year, reinforces my suspicion that when human presences enter the picture plane he has to fight to control and centralise the composition. In the final reckoning, perhaps it’s actually Struth’s authoritarian subject matters – technology, institution, consumption, globalization – and his apparatus – the lens, the film or pixels, the printer – that wield power over him and not the other way around.
Ossian Ward