Thomas Struth
				German, born 1954
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Like his teacher Gerhardt Richter and his compatriot Andreas Gursky, German photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954) is currently the subject of a major itinerant exhibition in the United States. Curated by Charles Wylie of the Dallas Museum of Art, its first US venue, the show features over 90 photographs made during the past 25 years. The catalogue, Thomas Struth 1977 - 2002, has been published by Yale University Press. Although equally gifted in his conceptual approach, Struth's work lacks the astonishing, high tech glamour that one found in the excellent survey of Andreas Gursky that recently finished its tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Still, anyone who has lived or travelled extensively in Central Europe will appreciate Struth's bleak, damp and psychologically poignant urban meditations. Visibly influenced by Erasmus prize-winners Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth's cityscapes also document the anonymous and sometimes oppressive industrial architecture of Europe and the United States. Since these sober and rigorous black-and-white streetscapes of the 1970s, Struth has expanded to portraits and his well-known "museum pictures"monumental and often ironic pictures of people visiting museums, churches, and other cultural labyrinths around the globe. His family series depicts German, Japanese, Chinese and Scottish families in all their genetic and cultural splendor. Although concerned more with relationships, social history and contemporary art, these works raise nonetheless many of the same questions of identity and aesthetics as the portraits of August Sander and Eugéne Atget. More recently, Struth has created lush, colourful and large-scale landscapes of jungles and rain forests in Asia and South America.