There’s no shortage in Thomas Struth news this year, much of it related to his longstanding collaboration with Lothar Schirmer.
Venice Biennial
Thomas Struth will be exhibiting at 13th International Architecture Exhibition, directed by David Chipperfield and entitled Common Ground , which will run in Venice from August 29 through November 25, 2012. Struth will present a selection of 56 street photographs taken from 1976 until 2010.
« Unconscious Places »
To mark the occasion of this exhibition, Schirmer/Mosel will publish the retrospective work, « Unconscious Places », which brings together more than 230 street photographs Struth has taken across the world over the past 40 years. The book will be published in August 2012 with an comprehensive essay by Richard Sennett. This is the twelfth collaboration between the photographer and the publisher.
The photographs in Unconscious Places were taken in many different cities with varying characters, as much in their urbanism (narrow streets here and grand boulevards there) and architecture (crumbling facades in Naples, the colorful buildings of St. Petersburg, or the ultra modern ones in Asian countries) as in the behaviors of their citizens.
“In an Asian country, nothing could be more absurd than wanting to wait until the streets are empty,” Struth explained in a 2001 television documentary directed by Jean-Pierre Krief.
While most of the streets photographed by Struth are devoid of human presence, or feature a few parked cars, the viewer notices that, for example, the streets of Shanghai are animated by the movements of passersby, seen as blurry figures in an otherwise sharp image.
Unconscious Places takes the viewer from one architectural and cultural environment to another, from one decade to another, and always with Struth’s photographic rigor. The book has us roam at first in black and white through the streets of London, Paris, Düsseldorf and New York at the end of the 1970s, through numerous cities in East Germany, in Italy (Rome, Naples, Venice), but also through Chicago and Tokyo in the 1980s. The first color photographs were taken in the Parisian neighborhood of Beaugrenelle (1980), and in Berlin and Shanghai in the 1990s. The photographs taken in the 2000s bring us to Asia (Korea, Hong Kong), the United States (Los Angeles), and South America (Lima, Sao Paulo). And it doesn’t look like Struth plans to stop any time soon!
« St. Petersburg »
To mark the release of Unconscious Places, Schirmer/Mosel is exhibiting a selection of recent Struth photographs in its Munich Showroom from June 5 to September 5, 2012. It features eight color street photographs taken in St. Petersburg in 2005. They are included in the book and are being exhibited here for the first time.
Among them are two very large Diasec prints, including a shot of the bustling St. Petersburg train station, which contrasts with the deserted street scenes on display. In these images, the sky is whitish blue, the buildings change from yellow to orange and pink. Is the city waking up? It might be dawn, in the hours when not even cats can be seen in the street. The images are as carefully composed as movie sets waiting for the arrival of the main character.
Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, Germany. He now lives and works in Berlin, having spent forty years in Düsseldorf, where he studied painting and photography under Bernd Becher at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie.
Book :
Thomas Struth, « Unconscious Places »
Text by de Richard Sennett (translation : Michael Bischoff)
300 pages, Taille: 30 x 28.5 cm.
ISBN : 978-3-8296-0618-9
(August 2012)
Exhibition :
« Thomas Struth – St. Petersburg »
From June 5th to September 5th, 2012
Schirmer / Mosel Showroom, In den Hofgartenarkaden,
Galeriestraße 2
80539 München
