Thomas Struth: Strangers and Friends

In his first book to be published in the United States, German photographer Thomas Struth explores the social space and mental state of the modern metropolis. Thomas Struth: Strangers & Friends covers the entire trajectory of Struth's career and his work in several subject matters, including his restrained and rigorous architectural photographs, intimate family portraits, and frenzied museum interiors.

A former student of artist Gerhard Richter and of photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, Struth began in the early 1980s to make steely black and white photographs of deserted city streets and decaying buildings in a restrained and rigorous style that seemed to underscore his debt to his teachers. In recent years, his work has diversified in subject, scale, and color to embrace increasingly ambitious subjects and challenging locations. Struth has extended his urban investigation to the inhabitants and interior spaces of the city, from Naples to Tokyo to Chicago to Berlin, portraying the relationships, conscious and unconscious, through which we build and abandon our identities in a world of transitory physical and social structures.

Thomas Struth: Strangers & Friends continues a notable tradition of books by German photographers from August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch to Hilla and Bernd Becher. It is the most complete presentation of Struth's work to date, following Unconscious Places (1987) and Museum Photographs (1993).

"Thomas Struth [is] one of a generation of photographers whose work is the latest strength of a German art culture that seems to have no end of aces up its sleeve. . . . His urban shots apply Becheresque formulas of static, unpopulated (surely early- morning), shadowless views with a feel for the `typical' or `average' aspect of a subject. (As if in compensation, Struth's astonishing family portraits burn with human presence. . . . His museum pictures, meanwhile, are wittily theatrical apostrophes of the `artspace' situations in which they are displayed. They are also beautiful.) Struth's work has taught me to appreciate, in retrospect, the fecundity of the Bechers, who helped form the aesthetic and ethical alphabet with which their ex-student spells out sheer poetry."
—Peter Schjeldahl, The Village Voice