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

hear, read or talk about the art works shown, often with accompanying gestures or
bodily movements. With their implication of speech and movement, these photos
are a dramatization of different forms of interaction between paintings and people.
In so far as ekphrasis is a kind of reception, the subject of these photographs, then,
is ekphrasis in various forms and varying degrees of intensity. Second, in
representing the museum visitors in a tableau or an extension of the paintings in
the museums, Struth provides a type of visual ekphrasis of the art works. By
photographing the people in poses and colors resembling those of the paintings
and from a camera position that fuses the two levels, Struth updates the paintings,
and indicates the bond between art and life as well as the relevancy of and need
for art in contemporary society.
The last photo in the series in the exhibition catalog, made two to three
years after the others and entitled Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice 1992 is a
particularly striking example of these two types of ekphrasis represented visually.
It shows a wide-screen, distance view of a room with Veronese’s large-scale
banquet scene Feast in the House of Levi (1573) covering the background wall in
full. Veronese has achieved not only a perfect illusion of depth, but also of three-
dimensionality, to which the pillars and the stairs on both sides contribute, and
which Struth has exploited for his own illusionism. Because of the camera
perspective, the people in Veronese’s painting and the viewers immediately in
front of it are about the same size, and in fact seem to belong to the banquet
guests just as the figures in the picture seem to be stepping out of the frame and
into the museum room. For example, the man with the red shirt in the far back
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