Nature & Politics is the catalogue of a major museum exhibition of the work of German photographer, Thomas Struth. The touring show focuses on photographs Struth has made since his last major retrospective, which covered the years 1978-2010. The book comprises 65 works and includes all of the 30 works in the exhibition to create the most comprehensive book of Struth’s recent work.
Thomas Struth is renowned for his practice of creating singular images, each within strictly segregated subject fields: architecture, portraiture, landscape and, most recently, sites of technological and scientific research. Nature & Politics brings together various of these diverse strands of Struth’s enquiry to present a significant monograph that explores in depth each of these themes, whilst also elaborating the interstices between them.
In recent years technology and the constructed landscape have become overarching subjects for Struth. Photographing at sites of new technology – techno-industrial and scientific research spaces, including physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and operating theatres – he has focused on machines which are some of the transformative instruments of our contemporary world and edifices of technological production where the heights of human knowledge are enacted, debated and advanced. These works explore the aesthetics of innovation and experimentation through the recording of structural complexities and allude to the hidden structures of control and influence exerted by these advanced technologies.
In the same period, Struth was working on two quite distinct projects. The first was Disneyland, a theme park which was famously constructed in reference to Walt Disney’s memories of his trips across Europe, transforming the passive experience of watching and of fantasy into a latent reality in California. Struth was attracted to this ultimate human-crafted environment, where technology has facilitated the materialisation of images from Walt Disney’s imagination.
The second project was the contested landscape of Israel and Palestine where Struth created a series of images which collapsed his strict subject fields, producing urban landscapes, portraits, landscapes and photographs of technology. Each photograph is a fragment which attempts to grasp the circumscribed reality of a region where coexistence has failed.
Struth seeks, in his own words, “to open the doors, to scrutinise what our contemporary world has created … what our minds have materialised and transformed into sculpture.” His images penetrate and report on the material spaces of the human imagination, and they are born from an accelerated moment when technology and the image industry have brought physical reality and the imagination closer together.
BOOK
Nature & Politics
Thomas Struth
MACK
Texts by Tobia Bezzola, Dirk Baecker and D. Graham Burnett
214 pages
95 colour plates
24 cm x 35 cm
Publication date: March 2016
€45.00 £40.00 $55.00
ISBN 9781910164471
http://mackbooks.co.uk
http://www.thomasstruth32.com
