Thomas Struth’s photographs began to be widely recognised internationally at the beginning of the 1990s. By this time he had spent more than a decade working on a series of street pictures that he began as a student at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, where he studied first under the painter Gerhard Richter, and then under the new professor of photography, Bernd Becher. Becher’s teaching, and the meticulous black-and-white studies he made with his wife, Hilla, of post-war industrial buildings and structures such as water towers, blast furnaces and pithead winding gear, influenced the approach of a generation of his students, including Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Axel Hütte and Candida Höfer.
After a year in New York, where he continued his street pictures, Struth graduated and extended the series to Tokyo and to other European cities, including Edinburgh, where he had his first British exhibition in 1987. The black-and-white pictures – for the most part, devoid of people, though certainly not lacking signs of human presence – were all taken on a large-format camera from a central perspective, looking straight down the street towards its vanishing point as the buildings diminished equally on either side. The effect of this direct view, far from being neutral, compelled the viewer to study the pictures in extreme detail; to take in the overall construction of the street within the frame of the photograph, and then to study its individual elements as the eye travelled down the length of its development, scrutinising and evaluating all the way.
“Why do cities look the way they do?” was Struth’s central question to himself. “You can’t always say it is the responsibility of the architect, or the mayor or the politicians; ultimately it’s our responsibility.” This question was, he says, “a central part of the consciousness of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the confrontation with my parents’ generation, with Germany’s past, interrogating the structures and realities of dictatorship, capitalism and communism, which inevitably led to the question of individual and collective responsibility for the factual.”