Paradise Reframed - retrospective featuring work of photographer Thomas Struth considered

AS THE DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART'S RETROSPECTIVE "THOMAS STRUTH" GOES ON VIEW THIS MONTH, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DANIEL BIRNBAUM REEXAMINES THE ARTIST'S CAREER AND HIS PLACE AMONG A GENERATION OF PHOTOGRAPHERS WHOSE LARGE-SCALE IMAGES HAVE MADE THE MEDIUM SYNONYMOUS WITH ADVANCED ARTMAKIING OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES.

The center is black as a solar eclipse, the yellow petals surrounding it form a dazzling corona. There is something ecstatic about sunflowers. At times they look like heavenly bodies, flaming suns radiating a cosmic glow. That's how they're depicted in a series of photographs from the early '90s by German artist Thomas Struth: close-ups of single blooms, groups of fiery blossoms against a deep blue sky, a paradise landscape of tall stalks with golden heads that eagerly follow the light. I could hardly imagine a more welcoming vision than Garden on the Lindberg with Sunflowers, no. 1, Winterthur, 1992, presented in Struth's 2001 book Dandelion Room: a small path leading through a garden of sun-bathed flowers and into the calm shade of the woods.

Confronted by an image like this, I feel tempted to parrot critic and Struth enthusiast Peter Schjeldahl: "When I am looking at it, it strikes me as the best picture in the world."

STRUTH BELONGS TO a small but highly influential group of artists--including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer, and Axel Hutte--who emerged some twenty years ago from the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie and radically altered our perception of the photographic image. (But what may appear from the outside to be a tight clique of artists working along similar lines is in fact--or so Struth maintains--a heterogeneous group who may share the same background and similar intellectual coordinates but who stopped comparing notes years, even decades, ago.) In a German art world dominated by painters, this generation's large-scale photographs, made possible by new printing techniques, mounted an unexpected challenge to the oldest art when they first appeared in the 1980s. By now we are used to these enormous color images of landscapes, architecture, cities, and people--indeed we have come to expect them on the walls of the same galleries we used to visit to see paint on canvas. Still, one shouldn't forget that this is a relatively recent development.

Today, Struth, Ruff, and Gursky are all world-renowned artists, and all of them have exhibited in major museums around the globe. Last year Gursky was honored with a midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now it's Struth's moment in the sun: On May 12 an exhibition of some ninety photographs dating from 1977 to the present opens at the Dallas Museum of Art; it then embarks on a year-long, three-city tour (including a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Asked about the possible impact of this major retrospective, curator Charles Wylie says, "Both the artist and I are very curious, since a survey of his work on this scale has never been attempted before. That people will have a chance to view the full range of Struth's oeuvre will no doubt lead to a different perception of his production in its entirety." And while Struth's work is too widely known for there to be any major surprises here, Wylie notes that there are nonetheless "a number of real sleepers in the show, like the s mall landscapes from Switzerland, which hardly anyone has seen, and a number of recent images of contemporary urbanity that open up new issues." Asked about the retrospective, Struth emphasizes the possibility of creating revealing juxtapositions of works belonging to different series, and also of producing a sense of coherence. "For me it's a lot about integration," he says. "For many years the sheep have been running in different directions. Now I'll have a chance to herd the flock together."

NO ONE WOULD DENY Struth's knack for producing extraordinarily beautiful images; in fact, it's his ability to craft photographs at once formally precise and visually riveting that has won him the recognition he enjoys. And yet, now that digital technology has opened up what art historian Thomas Crow refers to as the "occult potential" of photographic representation, and artists such as Gursky and Jeff Wall produce complicated scenarios montaged out of a multiplicity of shots, thus loosening the indexical link between picture and reality, a photo such as Garden on the Lindberg--or for that matter any of Struth's recent landscapes--may seem astonishingly conventional.

The flower photographs belong to a body of work commissioned by a Swiss hospital to decorate patients' rooms, but Struth doesn't hesitate to show this work in other contexts, and the Swiss landscapes opened up a new series of images involving far-flung natural environments. So what could possibly be the real aim, the artistic raison d'etre, of these landscapes and floral explosions? Surely a seemingly benign affirmation of nature's beauty can't be the sole motive; considering the rigor and consistency of the artist's previous work, it's only natural to look for theoretical underpinnings. One thing is clear: Struth traveled quite far--literally and figuratively--before arriving at the idyllic rural vistas in Winterthur. The route has taken him from the industrial setting of the Ruhr valley to the most urbanized regions of France, the United States, China, Japan, and back again. Still, there is a structural consistency to the projects that makes it quite clear that the same photographer is responsible for the c olorful image of the small path disappearing into the Swiss fairy-tale forest no less than the 1979 black-and-white photograph of the deserted Dusselstrasse in the artist's hometown.