Thomas Struth

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Thomas Struth (born 1954) is a German photographer whose wide-ranging work covers detailed cityscapes, Asian jungles and family portraits. Along with Andreas Gursky, he is one of Germany's most noted modern-day photographers.

[edit] Career

Born in Geldern, Germany, Thomas trained at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting under Peter Kleemann and Gerhard Richter before settling on Bernhard Becher's photography studio. He won a scholarship to work at P.S. 1 in New York for the year of 1978. His early works largely consisted of black-and-white shots of streets in Japan, Europe and America. Skyscrapers were another favourite feature of his work, with many of his photographs attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment.

In the mid-1980s Struth added a new dimension to his work when he started to produce family portraits. This was after a meeting with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann. As a result, these works attempt to show the underlying social dynamics within a seemingly still photograph.

Basing himself in the art capital of Germany - Düsseldorf, Struth's profile continued to rise in the 1990s, and in 1997 he was awarded the Spectrum International Photography Prize of Lower Saxony.

Struth had his first solo exhibition in the U.S. at The Renaissance Society in Chicago in 1990. He had an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2003. The centre of the exhibition was the Museum series, which featured seemingly ordinary shots of people entering churches, museums and other public places.