Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth is one of the most renowned photographers to have emerged from the Dusseldorf School, where he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher. His most celebrated images belong to his Museum series - monumental colour photos of people visiting and viewing art in museums throughout the world, including the National Gallery in London, the Vatican, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This new edition of Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs, which was originally published in 1993, presents large-format colour reproductions of the series, including new images taken between 1992 and 2002. Struth's photographs provoke us to explore photography's rivalry with painting, as well as such issues as how art changes by being in a museum, how it is displayed and how we look at it. In his introductory essay, Hans Belting discusses the complex questions that arise when viewing the photographs, and the way in which Struth makes viewers of his photographs aware of their own active participation in the completion of the work's meaning - not as passive consumers but as re-interpreters of the past for the needs of the present.