Thomas Struth

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Through April 12

Is it possible to create a comprehensive portrait of a country in only seven images? Thomas Struth took up this challenge for America, where he went on a journey of discovery in 1999 through the borderlands between California and Nevada. The images, shot in a variety of formats, offer a partial, somewhat fragmented vision of the areas he visited: views of alien settings that evoke Lynchesque atmospheres, deserts, and barely credible cities such as Las Vegas. For Struth, this journey served as an opportunity to truly explore the American landscape, bringing cultural differences to the fore and tracing the histories of the various cities he visited. The photos include many of the motifs the feature recurrently in the artist’s oeuvre: urban scenes and nature, either shaped by man or still half-wild.

Those shot in California show neatly ordered territories, extensively cultivated and illuminated by bright lights. Moving further West, Struth relates the current day mass tourism nature experience (El Capitan, 1999) and then leads us onto cities such as Las Vegas, where it’s possible to wander past Spanish galleons and mini-versions of Venice (Las Vegas, 1999). In Paradise 17, which correlates to the 1998-1999 series “New Picture from Paradise,” Struth returns to the forest motif in an image that, belying its title, is rather unsettling: from among the dark trees it’s possible to make out a narrow pathway that leads to nowhere.

Another leg in Struth’s journey from California to Nevada was San Francisco. Here he chose to photograph the Chinatown area, with its pagoda-style rooftops and shop signs written in mandarin characters. Last of all comes the Nevada desert. Struth depicts the ramshackle dwellings scattered here and there in the middle of nowhere around a service station (Nevada 2, 1999), or presents the desert simply as barren emptiness stretching as far as the eye can see (Nevada 1, 1999). For Struth, these images serve as metaphors for the various stages in the occupation of the state, from early settlement to the transformations it has undergone in response to the diverse cultural mores of its inhabitants.




Marina Sorbello
Translation by Rosalind Furness