German artist Thomas Struth has looked deeply and widely into the relationship between people and their environment. With concurrent exhibitions in New York and Berlin, the artist tells us about hi...
Family Portraits
– featuring Struth’s only figurative pictures – is a series ongoing since the 1980s. It first evolved from a collaboration with a psychoanalyst he met who used family photographs to explore the psyche of his clients – photographs as expressions of how family life was.
This is perhaps the thread that connects all three of Struth’s distinct bodies of work – a fascination with time and photography’s particular relationship with it: ‘Photography arrests and elongates something that is immediately past,’ he reflects. ‘My motivation has to do with the question, how do we live with history?’ There is little in the pictures to reveal when and where they were taken – but as you stand in front of them, there is a sense of time sifting, fragile and transient.