Thomas Struth

In the late 1970s, Struth abandoned painting to study photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and his earliest photographic work—black-and-white views that invariably look straight down the middle of a city street—are consistent with the Bechers' highly systematic approach. After a few years, however, he realized that nothing but his own rules kept him from moving the camera and pointing it in any direction that seemed promising. Struth thus gave up the rigorous structure associated with Minimal and Conceptual art to explore the potentially infinite fluidity of photographic description.
While Struth was vigorously developing other aspects of his work, he continued for many years to make modestly scaled, black-and-white views, adding to a body of work that eventually became global in scope. Despite the remarkable variety of architecture that appears in these pictures, they maintain a highly consistent style, equally attentive to the monumental and the minute. Here the artist's high vantage point and oblique angle of view concisely render the grand sweep of the modernist housing project and its man-made landscape while simultaneously enumerating its strangely uninhabited individual parts.