Thomas Struth: talks about his "Paradise" series - A Thousand Words - photographer

Struth paces the borders between cultures. His forthcoming retrospective will connect his various series: the famous street photographs from Dusseldorf, Rome, Edinburgh, New York, Tokyo; the individual and family portraits; and the museum pictures, begun in 1989--each of which presents different places or people of different origins within an equivalent framework. The museum images surprise the viewer by making him the object looked at; the "Paradise" series, 1998--, too, revolves around the issue of observer and observed: Faced with a reticent image of undifferentiated foliage, the viewer's thoughts have nowhere to turn save inward. In these photographs, Struth encounters the limits of a nondiscursive photography that de-emphasizes its specific object through the motif, a phenomenon manifested in Paradise 17, California, 1999, Struth's image of the dense California forest. This approach further highlights his particular, "painterly" manner in the context of contemporary German photography. Paul Virilio under stands photography as "the transit, or passage of the image, that confirms its concrete presence, here and now, before the viewer." Struth's photographs seem to extend and intensify this concrete presence in order to trigger the viewer's transit. Paradise has always been the fictive point of departure for a transformed view of the world. Changed, we grow toward ourselves--and each other-out of the picture's jungle.

HANS RUDOLF REUST