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

Kunsthistorisches Museum I, Vienna 1989, Stanze di Raffaello II, Rome 1990 and
Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice 1992.
But even photos that do not use this method achieve an impression of
temporality through the body positions and the gaze of the viewers. For example,
National Gallery I, London 1989 shows five people around Giovanni Battista
Cima’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas (ca.1502-4) of which all but one have
moved their head in a direction different from their body position. The camera
thus traces the movement of their gaze as it is directed from one painting to the
next. Yet, though recording both the “ephemeral glance of the passer-by” (here
the two men on the left) “as well as prolonged gaze of viewer” (here the girl with
the blue coat and the woman with the green coat), Struth’s museum photographs
“attribute to this prolonged gaze, within the suspended time of the photograph, a
length it perhaps never attained itself” (Belting 17). That is, while emphasizing
the temporal element of movement, the photos also underscore their ability to
arrest time. “Frozen in a pose of movement” (Belting 7), the museum visitors in
fact seem to represent tableaux vivants.
This notion of the tableau is further highlighted by the correspondence of
composition in many of the photographs and the pictures they show. Several
critics have noted how in Struth’s photographs the paintings’ spaces and figures
often seem to extend to the spaces and people of the photograph. 50 For example,
in National Gallery I, London 1989, the people form a circle around the central
image mirroring the circle the apostles form around Jesus in Cima’s painting.
50 Cf. Belting 10-13, 21; Hambourger and Eklund 157, 163; Rosenzweig 2; and Charles Wylie, “A
History of Now: The Art of Thomas Struth,” Thomas Struth 1977-2002 (New Haven and London:
Dallas Museum of Art, Yale Universtiy Press, 2002-2003) 152.
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