Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Chapter 2: Methodology
THOMAS STRUTH’S MUSEUM PHOTOGRAPHS AND VISUAL EKPHRASIS
From 1989 to 2001, the German photographer Thomas Struth traveled to
museums in six different countries to take photographs of people looking at
pictures within the context of a museum. His series, entitled Museum
Photographs, now comprises seventeen images 47 which represent the public or
private reception of art works in the public setting of the museum. Focusing on
the interaction between paintings and viewers, these photographs record different
attitudes to viewing art. For example, in Kunsthistorisches Museum III, Vienna
1989 an elderly man is shown as if privately conversing with Rembrandt’s Seated
man with a loose ruff collar (ca. 1633). 48 By contrast, Uffizi I, Florence 1989
shows two women with a guide book in front of Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna
(ca. 1310) who, in contrast to the gentleman in Vienna, do not attempt to see for
themselves, but probably see only what they read. Similarly, Musée du Louvre I,
47 Of the circa 800 pictures he took, he chose 15 for an exhibition in 1992 in Washington (cf.
Phyllis Rosenzweig, Thomas Struth – Museum Photographs, Exhibition Brochure [Washington
DC: Hirschborn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1992]). In an exhibition in 1993-1994 in the
Kunsthalle Hamburg, which has an excellent exhibition catalog with an extensive study by Hans
Belting, Struth extended the series to include seventeen photographs. However, a recent catalog
of Struth’s work (Thomas Struth 1977-2002 [New Haven and London: Dallas Mueum of Art, Yale
Universtiy Press, 2002-2003]) includes several new museum photographs not present in the
Museum Photographs catalog. These were taken between 1999 and 2001, and feature museums of
two more countries, Japan and Germany. The photos taken at the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin,
moreover, extend the subject of his museum photographs to architectural spaces. Moreover,
another new photo, National Gallery II, London 2001, is the first to feature only a single lonely
painting, without any visitors. Finally, Alte Pinacothek, Self-Portrait, Munich 2000 is the only
photograph with an oblique self-portrait of Struth’s left back and arm (cf. Maria Morris Hambourg
and Douglas Eklund, “The Space of History,” Thomas Struth 1977-2002 (New Haven and
London: Dallas Museum of Art, Yale Universtiy Press, 2002-2003) 163.
48 For copyright reasons, all illustrations of this dissertation had to be removed.
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