THOMAS STRUTH

It is with the sober and characteristic documentary eye of the members of the Düsseldorf school that Thomas Struth (1954) presents, in this series dedicated to exhibition areas, the vast halls of the reputable fine-arts museums. Proving a great technical mastery, Struth records, in an almost banal way and without any pictorial rhetoric, the behaviour of visitors, thus creating a distance from the viewer. The interest of Struth is held less by works of art of the institutions than by the relationships between the works and the viewers. The photographs, whose formats are close to those of photographic works of art, have acquired a theatrical dimension. A first innocuous look at how they are centred invites, in an almost immediate way, the viewer to participate in the show while encouraging a reflection on his own way of looking. From the apparent neutrality of Thomas Struth’s point of view is thus born, through the relational denseness of his photos, a complex dialogue with the viewer.

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