Appeared in Dossier Newsletter Issue 5, June 27th 2024

I became fixated with Thomas Struth’s black-and-white photographs of New York when I was an art student wandering the halls of MoMA. These artworks — made in the late ’70s of the city’s empty streets — seemed so devoted to the description of the physical world it was as if they were created by the perfect love child of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. 

Born in Geldern, Germany, in 1954, Struth studied painting with Gerhard Richter and photography with Hilla and Bernd Becher at the illustrious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his classmates included Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff. Using a large format camera, Struth has since created an expansive body of work that literally traverses the world. His pictures are tableaus so full of detail and place they are like catalogs of civilization itself.

Struth’s latest body of work, “Nature & Politics,” is currently on view at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris through July 26. 

Were you always drawn to the arts as a young person?

I was a stutterer; I stutter. So speaking was not really my domain. And that drew me to a fascination with independence. From early on, I always felt like I didn't want to do anything where somebody else tells me what to do. My mother had some affinity for the arts — music, pottery, theater — she had learned to be a potter. I didn't think about art as a profession. I just thought: Okay, artists are people who do what they like.

There's been so much that's been written about the Düsseldorf School of Photography, There seems to be a shared aesthetic or photographic approach among those who were there at that time. Where do you think that comes from?

The backgrounds the students came from were extremely different. For example, Andreas Gursky’s father and grandfather were advertising photographers, so his work is very much formed by this effect. That's just his background — what he made of it is a different story. I came from painting and drawing. To say I'm a photographer still feels strange to me. I'm a picture maker, an artist. Thomas Ruff comes from the Black Forest. He's interested in science and computers. After finishing high school, he was not sure whether he should go into the arts or into astronomy, which informs his work. And Candida Höfer: Her father was a very famous post-war anchorman on TV, so she comes from a quite worldly background. So the backgrounds of these four that I just mentioned are very, very different, but what was shared was that we all were children of minimal and conceptual art. And since Bernd and Hilla always, always used large format [cameras], everybody wanted sharp photographs.

When I look at your photographs, I have an overwhelming sense of them as a record of our civilization: Who are we? Is that something you are conscious of? 

When I made the street pictures and I was about to show them, first I thought: These are not about architecture. They are not about city planning. They are not about design. You look at the street as a group of actresses and actors in the public space, and you look at every building as if it were a person. There are buildings that are ignorant, arrogant, full of love, full of paying attention, bombastic, greedy — all these adjectives. When you first look at buildings like this, it's really hilarious, because there are moments where you think you're in a Marx Brothers movie or on a horror trip.

Can you talk a bit about the role that scale plays in the work? .

Thomas Ruff was the first of the Düsseldorf group to make these large portraits, which were very exciting. When I started with the Museum Photographs in 1989, I had the first three that I liked and I made small prints [of them], maybe three feet wide. And I made larger ones of the same three images. Of course the large pictures worked much better. 

What inspires you? 

What inspires me is always to cut it short. If I don't know what to say artistically, I just keep my mouth shut and wait. What has inspired me are often places in the past. I'm very thankful for these life-changing experiences to travel elsewhere. I mean my time in New York as a student, then working with Marian Goodman Gallery, who was a huge supporter, and with the artists in the gallery — that was an amazing time. And I met my wife in New York.

And you went to a roller disco in Queens, New York?

In 1978 I was a 23-year-old German post-war stutterer, really shy, and somebody brought me to the Empire Roller Rink. I loved it. I can’t tell you how much I was inspired. 

I fell and hurt my right wrist and my thumb, then I went back three days later to roller skate with them in a cast and the guy at the entrance said: You gotta be kidding — are you serious? I went back into the ring to skate. There was this degree of happiness. It was very sexy, the atmosphere. There were maybe 300 people dancing, and I was just completely in love with this. It was incredible being really very carefree and having so much fun and joy. It was super.