Wondering about Struth

Author(s): Shepherd Steiner

Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 4 (2001), pp. 68-75
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, University of the Arts London
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Something strange happens when one becomes involved with the work of
Thomas Struth. In looking at and studying this photography one becomes
more and more convinced of its sincerity and truth. Trust grows, and
especially in the portraits, friendships are made. Instead of highlighting
something like mediation, which has become a critical byword of late, Struth's
photography turns on a natural and almost living connection between form
and content. Moreover, rather than undermining what adequation there might
be between form and content, serious and sustained involvement with

Struth's photography enhances and builds upon this identification. One is

tempted to say that the narrative engineered upon first encounter with
Struth's work is progressively rounded out in encounters thereafter, so much
so that soon one is confronting the likes of an old friend or favorite haunt.
Take a work like Giles Robertson, Edinburgh, 987. If awkward at first,
narrative inches ever closer to the beautiful. What communicative potential
possessed by the portrait inevitably opens up to further dialogues and deeper,
more intimate bonds. A lunch time meal has just been cleared, a stain still
marks the table. A favourite book is brought out to end the fumbling. Can you
see it? A whole life is revealed: a life of learning and urbanity, of the most
gracious kind of bourgeois civility. If you are lucky, such narration is helped
1. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays, quoted in
Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Collins, Politics of
Friendship, London: Verso, 1997, p. 1.

68

along by the individual sitters themselves, or someone else who simply

knows the story or the circumstances surrounding a life lived, or an afternoon
many years ago. If not, then the kind of storytelling that ideally surrounds

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Giles Robertson (With Book), Edinburgh 1987,

42 58 cm, colour

Struth's photography is limited to the act of interpretation itself, in which case

identification takes its usual time. Of course, there are photographs that
leave one cold as well. But then, one always has favourites, and affinities for
a certain face or way of being, a particular street or a building, always make a
world of difference.
What is strange about all this is not simply the propensity to form an
interpersonal relation with a photograph, but even more that Struth's
photographs seem to expect, depend on, and actively pursue this kind of
bond with the viewer. What is strange is that something like friendship is not
only sustained but deepened over time; and what's more, over a period of
time which is rightly described as that of critical engagement. The fact is that
in the context of Struth's work the scepticism that runs through much
contemporary photography, as well as its criticism, is made superfluous.
Truth is never in question, precisely because the bonds of friendship are

always in place.
In terms of Struth's place in the history of photography this can be explained

as a reaction to the strict objectivity of the D?sseldorf School; specifically a

loosening up of the question of typology and the undermining of its rigid
instrumentality through the question of immediacy or presence. The
singularity of Struth's work seems to efface referential categories such as
genre or motif. The seriality or repetition characteristic of his teachers Bernd

69

and Hilla Becher is certainly operating, but not to the same extent. The
newness of the first encounter with someone or something is too important.

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Louvre 2, Paris 1989, 171.8 135 cm, colour

One can group his pictures according to an obdurate epistemology like "house,
street, individual, group" as in the title of an early catalogue, but what help is
this?2 If one is to account for the fact of surprise or wonder in the face of the

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new or different in each case, even these categorisations demand refining.

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2. Thomas Struth, House, Street, Individual,

Group, Yamaguchi-shi: Gallery Shimada, 1991.

3. See Hans Betting, 'Photography and

Painting: Thomas Struth's Museum

Photographs', in Thomas Struth Museum

Photographs, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1998,

Struth's museum photographs are a good example. Certainly Mus?e du

Louvre I, Paris, 1989, and Mus?e du Louvre II, Paris, 1989 play the part of
18th or 19th century salon scene painting - the Salle Mollien and the Salle
des Etats providing a backdrop for a contemporary gallery going public - but
there is something far more ordinary about them as well.3 In each case there
is a certain immediacy to the throng or the circle of children that grounds each
work in the everyday; in the particularities of a certain space and time. If the
folds of a blue coat, a boy's self-conscious look outwards, or the upward
gesticulations of the teacher's hands mobilise this in the latter, the painterly
glances and many gestures of the crowd accomplish this in the former. The
tight mimetic relation between photographed figures and painted figures is
something to which only the momentary can give rise. It is precisely this
wonder at the other in its immediacy that makes Giles Robertson, Edinburgh,
1987 exemplary of Struth's work as a whole.

p.18-19.
4. In Norman Bryson's account Struth's
photography is 'a question of a certain kind of
temperature of viewing, not too cold, nor too

warm.' Norman Bryson, 'Not Cold, Not too

Warm: The Oblique Photography of Thomas
Struth', in Parkett 50/51, 1997, p. 158.

70

What I am trying to isolate is a colouring or sensualizing of instrumental

reason. I imagine it emerging out of simply looking at the Bechers' work.4 It is
something that rests not only on an awareness of how such a cold and
rigorous practice is read or inhabited by a viewer, but just as much on how a
picture might unsettle the conditions of the latter through something
bordering on surprise. In a work like Giles Robertson, Edinburgh, 1987

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instrumental reason is shot through with a kind of pathos. Over what one can
only assume is a long afternoon, I take it for granted that a rapport has

developed and a certain familiarity grown between the photographer and the
subject.5 Giles Robertson, Edinburgh, 1987 is a moment rooted in this shared
history. Though there are equally compelling examples from other locations
and histories around the world - consider Beata and Kata Laszlo, Venezia,
1995; Family Okutsu, Yamaguchi, 1996 or Anna Grefe, D?sseldorf, 1997 - in
this case Struth's humanism is grounded in a particular set of material
relations built up over a number of afternoons and worked through over the
course of a couple of years. Struth's photography hinges on what minimal
adequation is forged between form and content herein.
Acknowledging this minimal adequation, or lack of identity between form and
content, is crucial. It places itself at a distance from contemporary liberal
theory at the same time as it recognizes that the success and failure of this
photography pivots on what liberal theory would claim as the immediately
social and communicative dimension of living labour. Thus recent

commentators on Struth can claim that his pictures 'belong to the subject. In
a way that counts, the subject authors the picture,'6 or that 'the picture has
been allowed to form itself.'7 Tempting characterisations though they might
be, such conclusions deny the viewer's own hand in constructing the identity
of the other. This blindness is something Montaigne's my friends, there is
no friend' both courts and escapes. In a single breath one is swept up by the
identification promised by friendship and a resistance to the truth of its
beautiful illusion. In the instance of Giles Robertson, Edinburgh, 1987 the
motivation that binds form to content can be nothing other than the
reproduction of an extant social reality. Minimal adequation is what identity
continually represses.8 It is always framed by the naturalisation of difference.
So if history (local, personal, social, cultural) is given its due, it gains a voice
only by virtue of translation, through a process of projection which finishes off

or idealises an incomplete relation only tending toward that of classical identity.

5. In addition to there being a number of very
different portraits of both Giles and his wife

Eleanor Robertson from the same sitting,

Struth describes the collaborative aspect, 'the

lengthy preparations', 'the invitations and

counter-invitations' extending over a two year

Given the circumstances, it seems that Struth's project amounts to an

attempt to think both friendship as well as the alienation incurred by this very
mystification. For at one and the same time one detects a sympathy for a kind
of democratic tolerance and ethical responsibility as well as an investment in
the notion of instrumental reason. As Derrida has shown, friendship is the
axiom of the political, and if 'the properly political act or operation amounts to

period in interview. See 'Interview Between H.

creating (to producing, to making) the most friendship possible',9 then

D. Buchloh and Thomas Struth' in Portraits:

Struth's photography takes the stability of identity as a departure for

Thomas Struth, D?sseldorf : Wintersheidt, 1990,

rethinking the terms of the democratic. How it does so is the crucial question.
To answer this we will have to confront Struth's photography as symbol and
how this is undermined by a notion of allegory, that is, as a celebration of
friendship and a testament to friendship broken.

p. 29.
6. Peter Schjeldahl, 'Epiphany', Parkett 50/51,

1997, p. 168.
7. James Lingwood, 'Open Vision', Parkett,

50/51, 1997, p. 138.

There is a picture of Gerhard Richter in a museum in Madrid from 1994 that

8. Rodolphe Gasch? clarifies what is at stake in

clarifies what we are up against. Richter is seated in the foreground with his

this Hegelian notion. He writes: 'Throughout

(Hegel's) Aesthetics the term symbolic
designates that particular form of art in which
the content, because it is still entirely abstract,

stands in a relation of total inadequacy to its

paintings in the background. What the piece speaks of, in a general sense, is
that in Struth's work the essence of photography has to be thought in tension
with the history it represses: that of painting. That there is a substantive
connection between photography and painting in the case of Richter that
goes to the heart of the matter. The point is that the causal nature of

contents inadequacy to its form and thus

photography - the relation that led me just now to pose this photograph as
something entirely other, as illustrative of a larger truth - is necessarily placed
in tension with questions hinging on photography as a mere effect. To
reformulate this as a linguistic problematic, one would have to call in both the

reduces the relation on which the symbol is

motivated nature of the symbol and the arbitrary condition of the sign. The

based to that of a mere search for a mutual

problem is that there is nothing arbitrary about Struth's photograph. The

paintings behind Richter, or for that matter behind Robertson, do not unravel

material form...Indeed, rather than stressing its

etymological meaning as falling into one, or as

throwing together, Hegel emphasizes the

affinity between meaning and form...As soon

as full adequacy is achieved, the relation in
question can no longer be termed "symbolic"'.
Rodolphe Gasch?, The Wild Card of Reading:

On Paul de Man, Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1998, pp. 59-60.
9. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, ibid,

p. 8.

71

narrative at all - as the arbitrary sign of painting should. Instead of distancing

us from identity, painting provides photography with a kind of deep history
that validates precisely its truth criteria. Richter's history is well enough
known. In the case of Robertson it is important to realize that he was not only
a distinguished art historian but a significant collector and connoisseur of
Italian painting. Rather than an example of linguistic mediation, painting opens
on to a rich interior life.

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This is the interpretative problematic par excellence in Struth's photography.

Let it stand as the limit of any critical encounter with his work, for try as one
might to turn a motivated relation into an arbitrary relation one will fail. One
should be able to puncture the necessity of photography by pointing up its

painterly aspects, yet not only does the minimal adequation between form
and content hold up under scrutiny, it becomes stronger as critical
engagement proceeds. Struth's work depends upon this act of identification
to such a degree that its status as photography is incomplete without it. In a
sense, the work counts on being looked at. In fact, the unity of Struth's
photography, the very truth of this photography, rests on the structural

relation actualised upon viewing. That one is blind to this structural

predicament in the experience of looking is the defining characteristic of the

'intentional object', an object assumed to be natural but in fact intended to be
looked at.10 If we are to grasp both friendship and its unraveling, it is the
structural relation animated by viewing and what is taken for granted within it,
where we must focus our critical attention.

That identity cannot be simply shooed away like some bothersome insect. It
remains a problem for, in effect, one is faced by truth in its insistent

appearance. In Struth's work the status of photography as a language of

presence or transparency is never in question. Truth always shines through.
Here is ground zero of what is commonly held to be the aesthetic: the
moment of the symbol, when concept and idea are one, or part and whole
identical. The truth photography reveals rests on an analogy with philosophy.
Like philosophy's relation to literature, photography's relation to painting is
founded on the correctness of its language. Truth is intrinsic to the technology
of photography, precisely because it possesses an indexicai value that
painting does not. As in the case of philosophy, photography hinges on the
assumption that language is no longer an obstacle to expression. If literature
and painting are plagued by the arbitrary nature of the sign the metaphysic of
both philosophy and photography supposes that form and content are
identical, or that difference can emerge in the world.
If we are to arrive at a complete accounting of Struth's work, photography as
symbol will need to be deconstructed. Struth's project turns on staging
photography as the paradigmatic medium or technology of the symbol in
order to think the question of viewing. The symbol is not resistant to linguistic
critique. The instrumental function of language should take hold of the set of
organic metaphors holding truth in place and turn these into a question of
mere effect: a question of painting.

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We know from the work of Paul de Man, that the tension we have been

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10. See Paul de Man, 'Form and Intent in the

American New Criticism', Blindness and

Insight, Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1983, pp. 20-35.

11. See Paul de Man, 'Sign and Symbol in

concentrating on between photography and painting - no less than the

slippery relation this entertains with philosophy and literature - can be
radicalised as the binary opposition between photography and rhetoric or
philosophy and rhetoric. For our purposes his most succinct statement on this
issue hinges on the central place accorded the symbol in Hegel's Lectures on
Aesthetics. It is entirely apropos the predicament of Struth's photography, vis
a-vis the work of the Bechers, that de Man sets his argument against an
interpretative backdrop that reads Hegel as 'a theoretician of the symbol who
fails to respond to symbolic language.'11 What is at stake in both Hegel's and
Struth's usage of the symbol is a rhetoric of immediacy.12 Simply put, the

Hegel's Aesthetics', Aesthetic Ideology,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987, p. 95.

nature of the symbol is bound up in the simultaneous, arbitrary or painterly

ascription of meaning by the viewer: 'predication ... is always citational.'13 De

12. Rodolphe Gasch?'s summation of the

argument is precise: At the very moment
when philosophy reaches a certain fulfillment

Man writes,

of its goal in a type of philosophy in which

'The in its freedom from sensory determination, is originally

perhaps the most systematic layout of the

totality of all thinkable differences is achieved -

in Hegel's philosophy - German Romanticism

is in fact arbitrary, that is to say, it states itself as symbol. To the

paradoxically is sketching a retrogression

toward rhetoric' Rodolphe Gasch?, The Wild

Card of Reading: On Paul de Man, ibid. p. 51
13. Paul de Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's

Aesthetics', ibid. p. 96.

14. Paul de Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's
Aesthetics', ibid. p. 100.

similar to the sign. Since, however, it states itself as what it is

not, it represents as determined a relationship to the world that

extent that the points to itself, it is a sign, but to the extent

that it speaks of anything but itself, it is a symbol. The
relationship between sign and symbol, however, is one of
mutual obliteration; hence the temptation to confuse and to
forget the distinction between them.'14

72
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This clarifies many things. First and foremost it puts the question of the
aesthetic in the harshest possible light. One glimpses the relation that it has
always sustained with wonder and the technology of othering that wonder
has fulfilled within discourses of discovery.15 One sees 'truth' and how
conflicted it is, or indeed the beautiful and how it is implicated in a structure
of power. If couched in the bond of friendship, the instancing of the subject
turns on a far more violent appropriation of the world. In Struth's photography

one is always glimpsing this use, because of the emphasis placed on identity
and the impediments put in the way of unrestrained narcissistic projection or
identification. Struth's photographs are allegorical to the extent that narration
underwrites what perception posits as present or determined.16 In fact, the
identity posited by Struth's photography always stands as an 'allegory of
reading'.17
Consider again the tired subject matter of Mus?e du Louvre I, Paris, 1989,
and Mus?e du Louvre II, Paris, 1989. What is striking about each is the
significance of the immediate, and that the immediate is stripped of any real
importance by virtue of the series. Thus, in spite of occupying a place in a
series or actively referencing the series as a whole or the other pictures in it,
each picture references its very own peculiar conditions of viewing. Typology,
which in the work of the Bechers functions as an external relation between

discreet moments, has here become a problematic internal to the singular

event. Like the natural relation engineered between form and content in the
portraits, the spatial analogy here forged between figures of photography and
figures of painting depends on an act of viewing. While in the Bechers' work
one is confronted by a series of flatly arbitrary moments which gain meaning
only through reference to one another, in this pairing one is confronted by a
series of symbolic moments. If in the Bechers' work, time is a mere
contingency in Struth's work it is the defining category. In the latter, the

identity between photography and painting in each, because mimetic or

spatially bound, is entirely a function of an allegorical movement.

In his most recent photographs of the American landscape this passage is as

significant. Look at the unchanging face of nature in Nevada I, Nevada, 1999.
Here the beauty of wide-open spaces is no less the sign of a subject looking
to the perceived world for a depth it in fact lacks. If the picture describes a
fairly systematic world of differences - conjuring infinite depth as surface - it
poses as well the question of perception's correspondence to a temporal
movement that narrates these events. Set at an interminable distance, this

landscape has eyes. They place the process of identification implicit in the
machinery of the symbol under pressure. They thematise a limit beyond which
interpretation is blind, pointing up a passage or negative moment in a dialectic
which is continually secreted away. Quite frankly the wide open is a symbol
of identity and truth, but as well a sign of what identification continually veils,

a distance between the human and natural world. As an embodiment of

immediacy in all its rawness, this unknown section of the American landscape
is the most natural of subjects Struth could take up. Not because it is any
different from a designated natural wonder like El Capitan or indeed distinct
from even a marvel like Treasure Island in Las Vegas, but simply because
'wonder knows no exit from the unordinariness of the most ordinary.'18

Thus too, the viewer of Struth's museum photography: stopped dead in

15. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous
Possessions: The Wonder of the New World,
London: Clarendon Press, 1991.
16. See Kiyoshi Okutsu's succinct discussion of
this in Kiyoshi Okutsu, 'Photography as
Tautegory', Parkett 50/51, 1997, pp, 146-149.

17. See Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading:

his/her tracks, rapt in awe, or taken by surprise. Thus, the baffled people,
astonished people, the contemplative, devotional, stupefied, frenzied people
all wondering about truth, beauty, and art. As a figure of immediacy, the very
essence of surprise, wonder has an uncanny ability for unsettling the relations
between cause and effect. Like the tension between symbol and allegory -

which has to a large extent rehabilitated both the philosophical and rhetorical
legacy of wonder in contemporary theory - wonder has the capacity of

Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,

shifting attention from the object to the subject; from the question of the

and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press,

symbol to that of the sign. From an identification between painting and

photography to a disjunction between these binaries; that is, to an act of
narration where the reconciliation of the binary is engineered. In wondering,

1986.
18. John Llewelyn, On the Saying that

Philosophy Begins inThaumazein', in Post

Structuralist Classics, ed. A. Benjamin, London:

Routledge, 1988, p. 185.

73

perception is continually shown wanting. Its 'truth' is found to reside, not in

the image, but rather in an irrecoupable allegorical relation to an elementary
and practical confrontation with the world - a temporal relation continually

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repressed by a philosophy, which John Llewelyn reminds us, is said to begin

in wonder.19

Look at the woman with the stroller in Struth's Art Institute of Chicago II,
Chicago, 1990. Much has been made of her position vis-a-vis the perspectival
construction of Caillebotte's painting.20 And no wonder! It is as if she has
taken the street scene before her as an extension of her own space. The

same holds true for the woman nearer the painting on the right. What is also
undoubtedly true is that each of these figures, are simultaneously engaged in
another kind of reflection. Clasping ones hands behind ones back is as
earnest a gesture of this as the apparently slow, reverential approach of the

other.

For the woman with the stroller, experience and the representation of this
experience are two sides of the same coin. Both philosopher and rhetorician,
'mimic' and 'actor', the irony of her situation is paradigmatic of that
predicament which grips the viewer in face of Struth's photography.21 For
one's capacity to reflect upon the image is grounded upon a blindness to
one's empathie involvement with it. One could say that though a philosophical
knowledge of the image is grounded in the performance of a set of practical

linguistic and rhetorical competences, the meaning made denies this. Though
one might use the language of photography like a rhetorician, one treats the
language of photography like a philosopher. In Struth's photograph the likes of
a minor philosopher extricates herself from a form of object perception that
relies upon walking the streets of a painting. And yet, what is also clear is

that one must resist the temptation to hypostatise this mimetic act over and

above that of meaning made: each is as much a mystification. Being seduced

by the perspectival construction of an image and distancing oneself from this
seduction is a familiar enough experience for viewers of Struth's work.22 But
then, so too is anxiously worrying away about the problem of truth or the
identity between form and content. For Struth's work is not ultimately
concerned with these categories of the interpersonal. Friendship figures a
kind of correspondence that is far more fugitive. In it one hears a faint echo of
what Walter Benjamin called the 'just past.' For what is at stake in Struth's
photography is a thorough going materialism, a notion of meaning-making in
which the viewer listens to the work and responds in kind.23

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19. See John Llewelyn, On the Saying that

Philosophy Begins inThaumazein', ibid. p. 174.

20. See Richard Senett, 'Recovery: The

Photography of Thomas Struth', in Thomas

Struth: Strangers and Friends, Photographs

1986-1992, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994,

pp, 97-98.
21. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, trans. E.

McVarish, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric

and Painting in the French Classical Age,
Berkeley: University of Claifornia Press, 1993,

p. 75.
22. Bryson argues for the 'insistent diagonal' in
Struth's work. Norman Bryson, 'Not Cold, Not
too Warm', ibid, p. 158.
23. I would like to thank Alan Johnston, Robert

Robertson, Stephen Waddell, and John

Llewelyn for their help in thinking about this

essay. I would also like to thank the Canada

Council for the Arts for their support.

74

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Art Institute of Chicage 1, Chicago 1990,

161.4 128.6 cm, colour

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