Thomas Struth’s large-scale portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, taken at Windsor Castle, was commissioned photographs of the Queen commemorating her Diamond Jubilee, next year. When Struth was approached, he wondered,

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Thomas Struth’s way of seeing. BY JANET MALCOLM

ast April, the German photographer Thomas Struth went to Windsor CastleL and took a picture of the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh for the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is not the kind of photography Struth usually does. He is one of today’s most advanced and acclaimed art photog- raphers, whose monumental color photo- graphs hang in museums throughout the world, and whose interests do not extend to taking inoffensive pictures of famous people. But when he got the call from the National Portrait Gallery, in January, he found himself saying yes. The occasion was an exhibition of paintings and pho- tographs of Elizabeth II done in the sixty years of her reign, which the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 will celebrate. Struth’s photograph would be the final portrait in the exhibition. “When the National Portrait Gallery called and said that in their eyes I was the best person to do the portrait, I was quite shocked,” Struth told me. “My immediate reaction was ‘What can I possibly do that’s not only affirmative but would include a message from me? Would I be able to say something new about people like this?’ ” Struth and I were eating lunch in a Berlin hotel restaurant; it was a month after the sitting, and I had come to Ger- many to interview him and watch him at work. He is a tall, bearded man of fifty-six with large pale eyes and an exceptionally likable persona. He radiates decency and straightforwardness. He is kind and calm and modest. He is the kid in the class ev- eryone wants to sit next to. Struth went on to tell me of his elabo- rate preparations for the portrait of Eliza- beth and Philip. He studied old photo- graphs and found most of them wanting. He saw the technical mistakes, “what should not happen”—notably their dis- by the National Portrait Gallery in London, for an exhibition of paintings and tracting backgrounds. He visited Buck- “Would I be able to say something new about people like this?” ingham Palace and decided it was too clut-

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 95—133SC.—LIVE ART—R 21320—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN tered. When the gilded green, red, and doesn’t know exactly when—“I feel as if I early enthusiast, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote in white drawing rooms at Windsor Castle always knew about it”—and was tor- the Swiss art journal Parkett, in 1997, “It were offered, he selected the green room mented by the question of his parents’ is time to say that Struth’s pictures regu- (the white room was “too tired” and the complicity. His father liked to tell stories larly take my breath away. I find it hard to red room “too much”) and spent a day about his bad war. He had fought in look at them steadily for any length of there making test shots. “While I was France and then in Russia, where he was time, so intense is their effect on my emo- there, I said, ‘I want to see the dresser’— severely wounded twice, and survived “al- tions.” In the catalogue of a 2003 Struth the woman who is in charge of the Queen’s most as if by a miracle.” These stories “ir- retrospective at the Metropolitan Mu- wardrobe. Because the second thing I no- ritated” the young Thomas. “Whenever seum in New York, Maria Morris Ham- ticed when I looked at the past photo- my father talked about the war, he told bourg and Douglas Eklund testified to “a graphs of the Queen was that many of the only his personal story. He never said remarkable feeling” they experienced dresses she wears are very unfortunate. She something like ‘Oh, my God, when I while looking at Struth’s photograph of has quite big boobs and she often wears came out of it and realized what we had two women standing before Gustave something that goes up to the neck and done, I felt so sorry!’ That would have Caillebotte’s “Paris, Rainy Day,” “of step- then there is this stretch of fabric under the been the natural thing to say. But he ping into one’s own skin again, while face that makes it look small.” (I smiled to never said it. I don’t know what he be- alienation from others and from history— myself at Struth’s coarse reference to the lieved.” Struth went on to speak, in a the curse of the modern—is dissolved in royal bosom—a rare lapse in his excellent somewhat amorphous way, of his work as the image.” Today, there is no diminution English.) The day before the sitting, a form of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung of the enthusiasm; if anything, it is grow- Struth continued, “the dresser came in (“coming to terms with the past”) by ing, and sane critics are continuing to lose with twenty dresses. She was a very nice which Germany’s best spirits remain it under Struth’s mesmerizing spell. woman, and we had an immediate chem- gripped. Will his portrait of the monarch istry. I felt that she saw me. Later, she told who was on the right side of history (“the he morning after the lunch in Ber- the Queen that I was O.K.—that I was a last living connection to an episode—the lin, Struth and I drove to a factory nice guy. I selected the dress, a pale-blue island race standing up to Hitler—that Toutside Dresden, operated by a com- brocade with garlands, a bit shiny, and it has become the foundation story, almost pany called SolarWorld, where he matched nicely against the dark green.” the creation myth, of modern Britain,” as would spend the day photographing. I asked if the Queen accepted his Jonathan Freedland recently character- He had been there a few weeks earlier to choice and he said yes. He did not choose ized Elizabeth II in The New York Review ascertain whether he would find a sub- the Duke’s costume, except to ask for a of Books) bring his project of expiation to ject, and he did. We were greeted by an white shirt. At the sitting, the Duke wore a remarkable kind of culmination? agreeable young woman named Su- a dark suit and a blue tie. “He was per- If so, it will not be visible in the portrait sanne Herrmann, the plant’s public- fect,” Struth said. itself. Struth’s work does not reflect the relations manager, who took us to a In further preparation, Struth read a culture of guilt he speaks of. Unlike, for changing room where we put on white biography of Elizabeth, and “I felt sympa- example, the gritty, dread-inducing paint- jumpsuits, white plastic hairnets, and thy. They were my parents’ generation. ings of Anselm Kiefer, whose thoughts white booties over our shoes so that we She was exactly my mother’s age and never seem far from Auschwitz, Struth’s would bring no contaminating dust par- Philip was born in 1921, two years after photographs evoke nothing bad. They ticles into the plant. Dan Hirsch, my father was born.” He added, “I said have a lightness of spirit, you could almost Struth’s new assistant, who had driven O.K. to the commission for reasons I can- say a sunniness, that is not present in the in from Düsseldorf with Struth’s equip- not name, but I thought, I’m going to have work of the other major practitioners of ment—numerous cameras, tripods, and sympathy for these people.” the new oversized color photography— film—had already arrived. (“I desired The paradoxicality of Struth’s associa- Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Jeff somebody like this for a long time,” tion of Elizabeth and Philip with his par- Wall, Thomas Ruff among them. Struth Struth said of Hirsch, a twenty-eight- ents—his mother was in the Hitlerjugend is the Sunday child of the lot. His huge year-old Israeli, who had written to and his father served in the Wehr­macht photographs—city streets, people looking Struth and to Candida Höfer a few from 1937 to 1945—could not have been at paintings in museums, industrial land- months earlier, offering his services; he lost on him, and was surely implicit in the scapes, factories, laboratories, rain forests, had heard back only from Struth, who “reasons I cannot name.” Like many, if and family groups—are as pleasing as his interviewed him and hired him on the not most, Germans of his generation, persona; they seem to be an extension of spot. “Everything he said seemed very Struth has been haunted by the Nazi past, it. Michael Fried, in his tautly argued book honest and made sense.”) and speaks of the Holocaust as a major “Why Photography Matters as Art as We entered a large room filled with influence on his life and work. “If you Never Before” (2008), pauses to remark, machinery that made a great din and no- want to know what formed me,” he said with apparent (uncharacteristic) irrele- where disclosed the function that its beau- in our first interview, “this is the big vance—but evident intuitive understand- tiful forms followed. I immediately saw thing: the culture of guilt that I was born ing of the force of Struth’s radiance—“A why Struth wanted to photograph here. into and that surrounded me in my child- striking fact about Struth’s public career is Everywhere you looked, a fetching en- hood.” He told me that he learned about the almost universally enthusiastic re- semble of industrial parts appeared—like the Holocaust early in his life, though he sponse that his work has received.” An a found object—to tempt the eye even as

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 96—133SC. it baffled the mind. While Struth and Struth was laboring as mightily as the written an article about the antibiotics that Hirsch set up a large view camera in front machines to take his pictures. He had cov- were being secretly given to the trout. The of one of these ready-mades, and took ered his head and shoulders with a gray conversation turned to green subjects, and preparatory pictures with a digital camera, photographer’s cloth, and every shot I quoted Michael Pollan’s mantra: “Eat I was given a tour of the factory by Ulrike seemed to cost him great effort. He would food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” As- Just, another agreeable employee, with emerge from under the cloth looking beck laughed and said, “I guess I don’t do the title of quality manager, and learned beaten down and depleted. His assistant the not too much part.” As he spoke, he what all the activity and complexity was did things to assist, but Struth continued patted himself fondly, like one of the large, about: inert little tiles, about six inches to look as if he were undergoing a shatter- rich men of the past who took pleasure in square, called wafers, were being con- ing ordeal. He moved to another place on their fatness. verted into vital solar panels. The wafers the factory floor, and the exertions con- After lunch, we returned to the fac- were sent from place to place on the floor tinued. At around two, he reluctantly tory and Struth went back to his strenu- to undergo endless chemical alterations, stopped, and he and Hirsch and I and Su- ous labors under the photographer’s washings, and inspections—all done by sanne Herrmann drove to a restaurant cloth, with Hirsch hovering nearby, per- machinery. The occasional person we where the founder of SolarWorld, Frank forming his assisting functions when came across on the factory floor was tend- Asbeck, was giving us lunch. A long table Struth signalled for them. He worked ing to a machine, like a nurse. Watching in a shady courtyard had been set with through the afternoon and into the eve- the machines work was amazing: it nine places. The party was filled out by ning hours. The time set for us to drive seemed as if the merest of functions re- four executives from the factory, dressed in to Dresden for the night went by, but he quired the most violent exercise of ma- dark suits, who filed in together and talked showed no signs of quitting. Ulrike Just chinery. A certain inspection of the wa- only to each other. Lunch was delicious, was staying after hours—she had been fers, for example, was done by a machine featuring the white asparagus then in sea- told to stay as long as Struth wanted to that fairly jumped up and down with ex- son and being served everywhere in Ger- work. I tried to busy myself by taking pic- citement. The single human interven- many. Asbeck, who was fat and exuberant, tures with my Instamatic camera. Finally, tion—a final inspection by specially more Bacchic than Apollonian, told an I rather crossly left for Dresden in a taxi. trained eyes and hands—would one day amusing story about his previous work, Of course, my crossness was unjustified. cease; inevitably, machines that could do something about being fired before he was I had wanted to see a master photographer this work would be invented. hired to run a trout farm because he had at work, and had just had the chance to do

“String Handling, SolarWorld, Freiberg 2011.” The SolarWorld factory outside Dresden makes solar panels.

TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 97—133SC.—LIVE ART—R21326—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—#2: PAGE ID TEXT CHANGE—VERSION 2 PAGE CHANGE IN PAGE ID so. Struth’s invisible cloth of obliviousness contributes to cultural dominance. I hadn’t “The more is a desire to melt, like to— was as necessary to his art-making as the realized this before. But when I went there how can I say it?—be an antenna for a part actual cloth he worked under. To enter the to photograph I saw that it is something of our contemporary life and to give this state of absorption in which art is made re- you cannot put into a photograph.” energy, put that into parts of this narrative quires reserves of boorishness that not “Do you feel you need to put large of visual, of sort of symbolic visual expres- every exquisitely courteous person can meanings into your work?” I asked. sion . . .” Struth struggled, and gave up. summon but that the true artist unhesitat- “Well, it’s part of my thinking. It’s I asked him if the fact that Solar- ingly draws on. something that stimulates me. To have a World’s activity had to do with solar en- The next day, Struth, his courtliness narrative is an incentive. If it was only ergy was part of his interest in photo- restored, and I walked around Dresden about composition and light and beauti- graphing there. and talked about his project of taking pho- ful pictures, I could just photograph He said that it was, and added, “My tographs at industrial and scientific work- flowers.” own personal energy account is very bad, places. I asked him if he felt he was mak- “Forget the flowers,” I said. “Let’s stay because I fly so often and drive, and can’t ing some sort of “statement” about society in the factory. Because there were very claim that I’m a good sustainable-energy with these photographs. beautiful forms there. Wouldn’t that be person. But I’ve almost always voted for “I think yes,” he said, but he added, enough for you? If you just found beauti- the Green Party, and since it was founded “Some of the pictures don’t show what I ful compositions there, and made beauti- I always thought these subjects were im- was thinking. For instance, when I went to ful photographic abstractions. You want portant and are a fascinating challenge for Cape Canaveral as a tourist I was struck to do more than that?” the world.” with the sense of the space program as an “Yes.” “How will your pictures show that instrument of power. When, as a state, you “I’m trying to elicit from you what the what is being produced at SolarWorld is demonstrate that you are able to do that, it more is.” good for mankind?”

“Galleria dell’Accademia I” (1992) shows museum visitors standing in front of Veronese’s “Feast in the House of Levi.”

TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 98—133SC.—LIVE ART—R21321—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—PLEASE PULL KODAK PROOF FOR PRESS COLOR GUIDANCE “Just by the title.” to display painterly skills but to cast a of each example of the type of structure “So photographs don’t speak.” cold eye on the psychopathology of mid- under study, and arranging the portraits in “The picture itself is powerless to twentieth-century American life. The grids of nine or twelve or fifteen, to bring show.” huge paintings of Airstream campers and out the individual variations. They did this gooey pies on luncheonette counters for fifty years, never deviating from their hat afternoon, we flew to Düsseldorf, brought the details of the color photo- austere formula: all the photographs were where Struth has lived and worked graphs they were based on to an arresting, taken at the same aboveground-level forT most of his life. He recently moved his sometimes almost comical degree of visi- height and under overcast skies (to elimi- living quarters to Berlin, and was about to bility. These paintings were about scale— nate shadows), as if they were specimens move his studio there as well. But Düssel- in much the way that the oversized pho- for a scientific monograph. dorf has been the center of his artistic life tographs of Struth, Gursky, Wall, Höfer, Struth is reserved about the Bechers’ since he entered its Kunstakademie, in et al. are—and in this sense they antici- photographs, though he respects what he 1973, and studied first with the painter pated the new photography, though they sees as the ideological backbone of their Gerhard Richter and then with the pho- were evidently not a conscious influence enterprise. “When Bernd and Hilla made tographers Hilla and Bernd Becher. He on the new photographers. this contract with themselves in the entered the academy as a student of paint- nineteen-fifties, to catalogue these kind ing. The paintings he has preserved from ecalling his student days, Struth of objects, German photography was all this period show a penchant for surrealist spoke of the atmosphere of serious- abstract subjectivism,” he said. “People creepiness—they depict looming land- Rness that permeated the academy: “When didn’t want to look at reality, because scapes and sinister people and are painted I came there, it was a shock to realize that what you saw in Germany in the fifties in a precise, Magritte-like style. After two I had to regard art as a serious activity and was destruction and the Holocaust. It was and a half years, Richter proposed that develop a serious artistic practice. Painting all a terrible reality, so precise looking was Struth go and study with the Bechers. and drawing was no longer my hobby, a not a widespread impulse.” The Bechers’ Struth had started photographing as an aid private activity that I enjoyed. It was some- precise looking was a model of ethical to his painting. He would photograph thing that had categories. Artists were rigor. But Struth believes that “eventually people on the street, who became the people who took positions and repre- their meaning in the history of art will be haunted figures in his paintings, as well as sented certain social and political attitudes. linked more with their teaching and the the streets themselves, in early-morning de It was an intense experience to realize this. influence it had than with their work.” Chirico emptiness. His paintings became There was very intense judgment by the I asked Struth about the influence on more realistic, and cost him more effort, students—who is doing something inter- him of the Bechers’ pedagogy. and, as they did so, he had an epiphany. “I esting and who is an idiot painting lemons “Their big pedagogical influence was realized, this takes too long,” he said over as if he were living in the time of Manet that they introduced me and others to the lunch in a Düsseldorf café. “And that I’m and Cézanne.” history of photography and to its great not interested in the painting process. I’m In a 1976 student exhibition at the figures. They were fantastic teachers, and interested in making pictures. And if I’m academy, Struth showed forty-nine of the they were fantastic teachers in the way that not interested in spending time accurately black-and-white photographs he had they demonstrated the complexity of con- rendering the shadows in the coat and get- taken of empty Düsseldorf streets from a nections. It was an outstanding thing that ting the color of the hat right and stuff like frontal perspective leading to a vanishing when you met with Bernd and Hilla they that, I realized—” point, and the success of the series led to a didn’t talk about photography alone. They “You realized that someone else or, scholarship in New York, where he did talked about movies, journalism, litera- rather, something else—a camera—could the work for which he was first known— ture—stuff that was very comprehensive do this for you?” I cut in, imagining the black-and-white photographs of empty and complex. For example, a typical thing eureka moment. New York streets, again taken head on. Bernd would say was ‘You have to under- “Yes. After I started taking photo- The assumption that these single-minded stand the Paris photographs of Atget as graphs from which I would make my works were inspired by the Bechers’ über- the visualization of Marcel Proust.’ ” paintings, I realized that the photograph singleminded photographs of industrial I said, “I don’t get it. What does Atget already does it. The photograph already structures turns out to be wrong. As it have to do with Proust?” shows what I want to show. So why happens, when Struth took his Düsseldorf “It’s a similar time span. What Bernd make a painting that takes me five pictures, he had not yet seen the Bechers’ meant was that when you read Proust that’s months to finish and then it looks like a photographs—another example of the what the backdrop is. That’s the theatre.” photograph?” Zeitgeist’s uncanny ways. “Did you read Proust while you were “That’s what the photo-realists did,” The Bechers are cult figures, known in studying with the Bechers?” I said. the photography world for their “typolo- “No, no. I didn’t.” “Yes, but that’s naïve. I remember when gies” of water towers, gas tanks, workers’ “Have you read Proust since?” I first saw those paintings, I thought, That’s houses, winding towers, and blast fur- “No.” not very interesting. They are only trying to naces, among other forms of the industrial “So what was the point for you of show they can paint. That’s not art.” vernacular. In the late fifties, they began connecting Atget with Proust?” Struth, of course, was mischaracterizing going around Germany, and then around Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad ex- the photo-realist project—which was not the world, taking the same frontal portrait ample,” he said.

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 99—133SC. “It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed. Struth went on to contrast the be- ARRIVALS loved, haimish Bechers, whose classes were often held at their house or in a Sign in the airport: Chinese restaurant, with the “much It’s not how much more difficult to deal with” Gerhard Cloud, Richter: “Gerhard was very ironic. I but what kind. never had the feeling that he is someone who speaks naturally or openly. He was * friendly, but you never knew what he re- ally meant. It was very coded language Welcome. and coded behavior.” Struth’s characterization of Richter “We don’t play requests, did not surprise me. I had seen the por- but we don’t play bagpipes, trait of him and his wife and two chil- either. We fgure dren that Struth took for the Times that’s fair.” Magazine in 2002, on the occasion of a Richter retrospective at the Museum of That’s the bad-boy Modern Art in New York. It is a beau- sass tifully composed picture of four people of globalization whose bodies are rigid with tension, and whose staring faces illustrate different kick-starting you ways of looking hostile. White lilies in a on Clear Channel glass vase and a picture of a skull on the wall reinforce the photograph’s primal unease. I was surprised to hear that Richter and his wife liked the picture. inspection. The Grieger lab is considered ting a little apart, not touching, looking “It’s a very sad and disturbing picture,” the supreme printing lab for large-scale straight ahead. Gradually, the royal couple I said. photography and is the place where many came into focus as such, and the photo- “O.K.,” Struth said. of its practitioners go to have their prints graph assumed its own identity as a work “They do not look like a happy family.” made. At Grieger, we were met by Dag- by Struth, the plethora of its details some- “Well, that’s not the issue.” mar Miethke, who was Struth’s “special how tamed to serve a composition of satis- “That almost is the issue of the person” there, and on whose eye and taste fying serenity and readability. picture.” he depends for the finish of his photo- Struth broke the silence and said that Struth conceded that “they don’t look graphs. Miethke, an easy and friendly the picture was too yellow, and for the next relaxed and happy,” and added, “He’s not woman of around fifty, pinned the print half hour color adjustments were made on an easy person, that’s for sure. He’s a very to the white wall, and the three of us si- test strips, until he was satisfied that the particular person.” lently regarded it. print had reached the degree of coolness As we were leaving the café, Struth My first impression was of a vaguely fa- he wanted. Then the issue of size arose. said, “I feel bad about Proust and Atget.” miliar elderly couple posing for a formal The print we were looking at was big, Struth is a sophisticated and practiced portrait in a corner of the palatial Minne- around sixty-three by seventy-nine inches, subject of interviews. He had recognized apolis hotel ballroom where their fiftieth and he asked that a larger print be made. the Proust-Atget moment as the journal- wedding anniversary is being celebrated. When this was produced, he regarded the istic equivalent of one of the “decisive The pair were seated on an ornate settee, two prints side by side for a long while. It moments” when what the photographer and my attention was drawn to the wom- seemed to me that the smaller print was sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says, an’s sturdy legs in beige stockings, the right more flattering to the Queen—the larger “This is going to be a photograph.” I knee uncovered where the skirt of her pale- print made her look larger, almost gross. made reassuring noises, but I knew and blue silk dress had hitched up a bit as she Struth finally asked that the smaller print he knew that my picture was already on settled her ample figure into the settee; and be taken away so that he could study the the way to the darkroom of journalistic to her feet, in patent-leather pumps larger print without distraction, and he opportunism. planted firmly on the fancy hotel carpet. finally decided on it. Further color adjust- Her white hair was carefully coiffed, in a ments were made on the big print—the uring our conversation in the café, sort of pompadour in front and fluffy curls Queen’s hands were made less red, the Struth received a phone call from on the sides, and her lipsticked mouth was background was darkened, to noticeably theD Grieger printing lab telling him that set in an expression of quiet determination. good effect—and Struth was satisfied. the first test prints of his portrait of the The man—a retired airline pilot?—was Struth had positioned the settee—up- Queen and the Duke were ready for his smaller, thinner, recessive. They were sit- holstered in green silk brocade, with

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 100—133SC. tells the truth of what the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked. Only where even the spin the person being photographed can as- gets spun. sume the lying appearance of “naturalness” that the portrait photographer seeks and * tries to elicit with his repertoire of blan- dishments. But this appearance is not Here’s one: enough to give the portrait the look of art. For that, the preparations that Struth The devil is a blowsy talked of—the fussing with pillows and failed executive the tilting of sofas and, most crucially, the selection of site—is necessary. The por- who fres burnouts, traits of August Sander, who may be the star after star. greatest portrait photographer in the his- tory of the medium, are a great object les- * son in the significance of settings in the art of the photographic portrait. His settings Every known object are not incidental backgrounds for the rotates figures whose souls he seems to have cap- tured with his camera; they are intrinsic to as if: the viewer’s sense that such a capture has taken place. And so it was with Struth’s b. keeping busy portrait of Elizabeth and Philip. c. stunned n one of our talks, Struth told me that —Rae Armantrout when he was in high school he be- Ilonged to a little band of classmates— four boys and four girls—who spent all curved gilded arms and legs—at a slant, so other showed the Queen looking majes- their time together and were determined that the Queen was more prominent and tic, the way she looks on money. In oth- not to be like their parents, whose recoil lit with a kind of white glow, while the ers, her mouth was slightly and from the catastrophe of the war had Duke receded into the shadows. The awkwardly open, or her hands were taken the form of ultra-conventional be- Duke is still handsome at ninety, his mil- folded on her lap in what Struth called a havior and a devotion to what was “safe itary bearing intact, but in the double por- “defensive” position. The selected pic- and clean.” Later, as I was leafing through trait, next to the Queen’s amplitude, he ture was indeed the right one. a book of Struth’s photographs, this looked a bit shrunken. Struth said he believed that his prepa- phrase came floating to mind, for there is Struth said of the sitting, “When we rations impressed the royal couple and a sense in which it describes the world of walked in”—he was accompanied by contributed to the success of the portrait: Struth’s huge, handsome pictures, from Hirsch and another assistant, named “They saw we took the task seriously.” He which the dangerous and dirty is con- Carolina Müller—“they were not partic- spoke again of the bad photographs of the spicuously absent. “Dallas Parking Lot” ularly friendly. No smiles. I was very ner- Queen and the Duke that he had studied, (2001), for example, a magnificent com- vous. I took a few shots and realized I this time in terms of “the mistakes that position of cool grays and icy blues and hadn’t adjusted the shutter opening. make them look like almost comic imper- warm browns that Struth extracted from Then I saw that the pillow behind the sonators of their functions rather than like the ugly mess of the construction boom Queen was not in a good position—ex- real people. You would be shocked by how in Dallas, shows a rooftop parking lot in actly the kind of mistake I didn’t want to many terrible photographs there are of early-morning near-emptiness and after- make—so I said to her, ‘Excuse me, can them. It’s clear that the best pictures of rain freshness, over which pristine glass you lean forward,’ and I just fixed the pil- Elizabeth and Philip are by Lord Snow- high-rise buildings hover like benign low behind her back. Then I made three don, because he was a family member. guardians of the sleeping city’s security. or four more shots. And one of those Elizabeth looks happiest in Snowdon’s As it happened, this picture was not in- shots was it. I knew it was it.” photographs.” He added, “I think what cluded in a retrospective of Struth’s work At his studio, Struth showed me the matters is that when the circumstances are in Düsseldorf (these days, there seems to contact sheets of the sitting. There were prepared well and the people sit and look be a Struth exhibition opening some- the pictures with the badly positioned into the camera there is always a chance of where at every moment), to which he ac- pillow behind the Queen. In another re- truth.” companied me on my last day in Ger- ject, the Duke had both hands on his In fact, there is more than a chance. many, but in which many other thighs, rather than one hand strategi- Photography is a medium of inescapable representations of Struth’s safe and clean cally placed—as Struth instructed him truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know world were on view. to place it—on the seat of the sofa. An- how to lie. The most mindless snapshot His monumental (fifty-seven by sev-

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 101—133SC.— enty-four inches) portrait of the eight step back behind a line on the floor. Struth these days is running his business. His art members of the Ayvar family, in Lima, is did not say, “I took that picture,” but obe- has made him rich, and his dealings with a rare encounter with poverty. That the diently stepped back behind the line. A lit- the people who have made him (and them- family is poor may be inferred from the tle further into our tour of the show, the selves) so occupy a good portion of his time room in which they sit—a piece of plas- guard—a small woman of Japanese origin, (and of the studio’s functions). He is on the terboard with cracks in it appears behind now informed of Struth’s identity—reap- phone a lot: someone is always calling him the group, the foreground shows part of a peared and profusely apologized for her about some business particular; he seems patterned velvet sofa over which a sheet blunder. Struth good-humoredly reas- to be under pressure. has been thrown to hide something torn sured her, but she could not stop apologiz- It wasn’t always like this, he told me, or ruined, a dark muddy linoleum covers ing and finally withdrew, walking back- and cited two events that changed his life the floor, a small cheap religious print ward with her hands held in supplication from that of a carefree rich artist to that of hangs high on the wall. Clearly the spare- and her head bobbing up and down in lit- one who feels he has to hustle to remain ness of the room is an object not of ad- tle Japanese bows. one. The first was the renovation, in 2005, vanced taste but of want, of not having the The picture we had been standing in for a hundred and fifty thousand euros, of things that advanced taste keeps at bay. front of showed a semi-submersible oil rig the Düsseldorf studio. The second was his The family members—a tiny, dark-haired in a shipyard on Geoje Island, in South marriage, in 2007, to Tara Bray Smith, a mother, a gray-haired father, and six chil- Korea—a huge red thing, a colossus on young American writer, who gracefully dren, ranging in age from a seven- or four legs on a platform afloat near the accepted living in Düsseldorf for two and eight-year-old boy to a grown son and shore, taut cables anchoring it to the con- a half years, and then proposed the move daughter—sit at a small table facing the crete pavement onshore, on which piles of to Berlin—which Struth was happy to photographer. A current of sympathy miscellaneous building materials are make. “The time was over. I was so used runs between the subjects and the pho- strewn. The photograph (a hundred and to Düsseldorf—it seemed good to move tographer that brings to mind the sympa- ten by a hundred and thirty-eight inches) somewhere else.” Good but not cheap. thy that flowed between Walker Evans magisterially represents what can be called “Before I did the renovation of the and the sharecropper family he photo- the new optics of the new photography, studio and before I got married, I had one graphed in Dust Bowl Alabama, in the which sees the world as no human eye assistant, not three, I needed very little nineteen-thirties. But with this difference: does. When you look at these photo- money, my apartment was very inexpen- Evans’s black-and-white photographs are graphs, it is as if you were looking through sive,” Struth said. “I made much more heavyhearted pictures. They show the strange new bifocals that focus on things money than I needed—and I paid a fifty- hopelessness of the struggle of the people at a distance at the same moment that per-cent tax to the German state. Then I they dignify and beautify. The smell of they focus on things close up. Everything did the renovation, I met Tara, we moved poverty wafts out of them. If any smell is equally sharp. Struth’s photograph of to Berlin, I rented a studio there that was wafts out of the photograph of the Ayvars, Notre Dame is another striking example six thousand euros a month, I hired two it is that of laundry detergent. The father’s of this phenomenon. Every detail of the more assistants, Tara said she would love crisply ironed short-sleeved dress shirt, façade is rendered in razor-sharpness, as to have a small place in New York, and I the children’s neat white and pastel-col- are the clothes and knapsacks of the thought, O.K., it makes sense, and we ored T-shirts, decorated with cartoons, dwarfed tourists in the plaza in front of it. found one, though a bigger place than I and, most conspicuously, the bleached Reproductions of these photographs in thought. All of a sudden my expenses ex- white cloth draped over the table, every books give only a hint of their breathtak- ploded, and I felt much more pressure to stitch of whose green-and-red cross- ing strangeness. One needs to see them sell.” I asked Struth what his photographs stitched border is made visible, you could full size to marvel at them. sell for, and he replied that at Marian almost say celebrated, by the oversized Goodman, in New York, it is around a print’s magnification—all this creates a fter the museum, Struth took me to hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The gestalt that is far removed from that of the his studio, which was in the process gallery takes fifty per cent, and the state rueful Evans’s homage to the dirt-poor. Aof being dismantled. It was a very long takes fifty per cent of Struth’s share. As with all Struth’s photographs, it is hard room on the second floor of a former print- Goodman sold thirty-five pictures in his to say what “statement” it makes, but its ing plant, filled with desks and computers, last show, in 2010, but in Berlin only ten note is characteristically cheering, even sofas and bookcases, a drum set, and a nar- pictures sold that year. “There’s never cer- elating. The dazzling white cross-stitched row mattress on the floor neatly covered tainty,” he said. At the same time, “I’m tablecloth (to which the eye is drawn as if with blankets, where, after giving up his not worried. There’s always something.” to a central figure) emblematizes the Düsseldorf apartment, Struth would sleep For example: a commission from a bil- work’s optimism, like that of an Easter when in town. Windows facing the street lionaire (who wishes to go unnamed) to Sunday service—or an encounter with a lined one long wall, and a line of black file photograph his family, which Struth friendly photographer. boxes sat on the floor along the wall oppo- might not have accepted when he was As Struth and I were looking at an- site. These files, which relate to the busi- flush and photographing only people he other big picture, and he was pointing out ness end of Struth’s enterprise, were being knew and liked. something in its foreground, a museum reorganized before being shipped to Ber- At the studio, Struth leafed through guard suddenly materialized and told him lin; Struth wanted them to be in order be- the catalogue of the Metropolitan Mu- that he was standing too close and should fore the move. Much of Struth’s work seum exhibition to illustrate another sem-

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TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 102—133SC. inal event. This was the taking of a photo- gaping tourists before. I am also unable to to the world of Struth’s benign photo- graph entitled “The Restorers at San appreciate the series called “Paradise,” graphic vision. They reassure even as they Lorenzo Maggiore” on the last day of a large, straightforward pictures of jungles baffle. They tell us that the people who are three-month stay in Naples, in 1988. In and forests. (“His jungles look like the pot- absent from the pictures are back there Naples, Struth experienced the famous ted plants in a dentist’s office,” the critic somewhere and that they know what it all effect that the South has on industrious Lee Siegel wrote in 2003, putting his means and know what they are doing. Northerners. “I discovered I was just very finger on it.) On our way out of the Düsseldorf stu- happy there. I fell in love twice. I thought, Struth’s photographs taken in factories, dio, Struth paused to play a twenty-second I’m not only the strict German, I have laboratories, and nuclear power plants, on riff on the drums, relics of the days when some joyful capacity in me that he played in a rock band. We wasn’t unearthed until now.” drove to my hotel for dinner, The picture—a lovely composi- where Struth—after ascertain- tion in muted ochre and umber ing that he wouldn’t be acting colors of four people posed in like a rude guest—joined me in front of a long row of the large mocking the pretentious food old religious paintings on which served in mercifully stingy por- they have been working in a tions. (Everywhere else I ate in high-ceilinged room in a for- Germany, the food was elegant mer abbey—was the first pho- and delicious.) Back in New tograph Struth saw reason to York, I have been correspond- print big. It was also the work ing with Struth by e-mail. In that opened the door to the August, he sent me digital im- project for which he is perhaps ages of four of the pictures he best known: his museum pic- had taken at SolarWorld. They tures. These show what we see were both surprising—while at when we walk into a museum the factory I hadn’t “seen” any of gallery: people looking at paint- these images myself—and of a ings. We only secondarily see piece with the incomparable the pictures themselves. Marion Goodman photo- For about a decade, Struth graphs. I wrote to ask if he or ingeniously played with this Hirsch could also send me the conceit. In some of the museum snapshots that, after the formal photographs, the relationship sitting, Hirsch had taken of the between disturbing subject mat- Queen and the Duke looking at ter—such as that of “The Raft a picture of Struth’s dog, Gabby, of the Medusa”—and unper- which Struth had thought turbed viewers was the point, or to pack when making his me- part of it. In others, spatial rela- ticulous preparations. Hirsch tionships were explored, such promptly sent three of them. as in the photograph entitled They are wonderful. My favor- “Galleria dell’Acca ­demia I,” a ite shows Elizabeth beautifully work showing Veronese’s “Feast in the the other hand, look like nothing one has smiling at the picture of the dog that House of Levi,” whose depth perspective ever seen before. These glimpses into what Struth and Philip hold toward her as they supports the momentary illusion that the the critic Benjamin Buchloh calls “the broadly grin at each other over her head. In visitors in shorts and jeans standing before technological sublime” were on view at another e-mail, Struth wrote that he had it are about to enter its bustling scene. Yet Marian Goodman last year and constitute heard from the curator of the exhibition at another concept was to focus solely on mu- some of Struth’s most powerful images. the National Portrait Gallery that Philip seum visitors, photographing them from While at SolarWorld with Struth, I had “was clearly touched by the portrait, and the point of view of the work they were these images in mind. The feeling of not asked, ‘How did he do that?’ ” I wrote gazing at. In one series, Struth shows tour- understanding what one is seeing, of not back and asked about the Queen’s reac- ists at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Flor- knowing the functions of madly tangled tion, and the answer was that it was un- ence gazing up at Michelangelo’s “David” wires and tubes and cables and mysterious known. In a recent e-mail, Struth wrote, and in another at The Hermitage, looking flanges and pulleys and levers, is brilliantly “Still have not given up to find out what at a da Vinci Madonna and Child. These conveyed by these huge pictures of places the Queen thinks. I tried to get in touch “audience” pictures are intermittently few of us have ventured into and on whose with the dresser, but I heard they are all amusing but, to my mind, a bit trite. We products many of us depend. Predictably, in Scotland right now.” He added, “Not have seen pictures of unself-consciously the places are not satanic mills but belong that that is at the top of my agenda.” 

Struth, photographed by the author, at the Grieger printing lab, in front of a test strip of his portrait of the royal couple.

TNY—2011_09_26—PAGE 103—133SC—LIVE ART—R 21319—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN­—PLEASE PULL KODAK PROOF FOR PRESS COLOR GUIDANCE­—VERSION 2 PAGE