Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: The Larger Project of Nonseparation
1 Archive
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2 Matrix 72
3 Assembly
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Appendix 1: List of Figures
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Appendix 2: Alphabetical List of Figures
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1 Archive
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978 Coenties Slip, Wall Street, New York 1978 Water Street, Financial District, New York 1978 Sommersstrasse, Düsseldorf 1980 Düsselstrasse, Düsseldorf 1979 Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 1986 The Felsenfeld / Gold Families, Philadelphia 2007 The Hirose Family, Hiroshima 1987 The Consolandi Family, Mailand 1996 Eleonor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987 The Richter Family 1, Köln 2002 58th Street at 7th Avenue, Midtown, New York 1978 Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo 1991 Jianghan Lu, Wuhan 1995 Dallas Parking Lot, Dallas 2001 Times Square, New York 2000
281 141 131 21 1 2301 9701 3561 6621 3511 8281 191 4211 6421 7971 7791
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[T]he relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. —Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification”1 Apparent near-collapse into its subject matter—this is a hallmark of German artist Thomas Struth’s urban architecture photography. If the empty city can be thought of as haunted by its past, the architecture of the city, in turn, occupies Struth’s inaugural phase of photography. As the first of Struth’s series of photographs, urban architecture presents itself as the defining framework of a series of uninhabited streetscapes. There, in lieu of a visualized populace (and its mantle as the traditional image of subjectivity), architecture emerges as the embodiment of history, meaning, culture, the site of inhabitation, and the mark of human production. In the absence of people, the architecture of the city comes forward to mark subjectivity, proposing the urban environment as the substantiation of an ever-changing historical subject. Realized in a series of foundational streetscapes, Struth’s near-collapse into his subject matter— his perfect alignment of photography to urban architecture—seemingly presents the city itself. With over five hundred photographs spanning more than two and a half decades, urban architecture is notably one of the main topics of Struth’s photography. The constitutive role that the interplay of architecture and photography plays within his oeuvre, however, reaches deeper into the structure of the work than implementing a category. Far from being encapsulated within one series, Struth’s images of urban architecture inaugurate a set of constructs that resonate throughout his photography, activating dialogues through which architecture surfaces as a central acting agent. By insinuating pictorial structures and modes of viewing into Struth’s oeuvre, architecture extends its reach beyond its literal presence. It is not as isolated subject matter that architecture is significant. Rather, it is in the intersection of architecture and photography that Struth generates foundational structures of image-making, viewing, and modes of amassing images into his first mode of production: the categorical archive. Photographic archives are collections of images concerned with their own history, content, and formation. In Struth’s practice, they establish a definitive moment. If urban architecture is the first subject matter Struth pursues, the archive describes his first phase of production. Archival logic unites discrete images into a series by coupling shared subject matter with a particular mode for viewing that content. In Struth’s photography, the archive is the site where meaning is first consolidated and made visible through his central-perspective streetscapes, which act as a datum and counterpart to much of what follows. The Foundational Image The central-perspective streetscapes dominate the first phase of Struth’s photography. Since their introduction in the late 1970s, he has produced nearly one hundred and fifty black-and-white and over forty color central-perspective street views, of which fifty are of New York. Three 1978 black-and-white streetscapes from New York—“Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978” (fig. 5), “Coenties Slip, Wall Street, New York 1978” (fig. 6), and “Water Street, Financial District, New York 1978”(fig. 7)—offer quintessential examples. Each of these images is characterized by a commanding central-perspective street view framed by two oblique planes of dense urban
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architecture. Photographed at eye level during moments when the streets were all but deserted, the central view conjoins with the empty street to convey objectivity. The core of the series combines four foundational elements: the central perspective, an oblique view of buildings, an absence of people, and a focus on urban architecture. Repeated from one image to the next, this foundation yields a stunning array of cityscapes whose focus and rigor declare the essence of the scenes they depict. Although Struth subsequently implemented alternate viewpoints, the central perspective remained dominant in his streetscapes for nearly a decade, during which its pervasive logic governed the relationship between photography, architecture, and the city. Its distinct vista, which simultaneously divides the image and directs vision, Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978 281 is first assumed by the and then reenacted by viewers of141 Struth’s phoCoenties Slip, Wall Street, Newphotographer, York 1978 tographs. collection of York cityscapes, which came to be known as 131 Unconscious Water Street, The Financial District, New 1978 Places following a 1987 exhibition and accompanying catalog of the same name, have come to summarize Struth’s concern with how questions of the collective unconscious convey themselves through the built environment. Subtending the photographs is a dual promise: the promise of the structure of the city to express its populace and the promise of photography to bring that expression forward. As the nucleus of the central perspective is the street, the photographs do not present buildings directly nor frame them individually, but instead offer oblique, layered planes composed of multiple buildings and the spaces they incorporate. As no singular plane in the image dominates focus, the overall effect is a nonhierarchical and seemingly neutral position of nonsubjectivity.2 Achieved by photographing the streets when they were all but deserted, the third constitutive aspect of the foundational image is the near-absence of people from the urban environments. Unencumbered by either people or cars, the photographs’ centers are quiet, imbuing images with a tension drawn between the city street and its arrested subject matter. The images thus present an unseen agent photographing a missing populace. Through this gesture, the urban inhabitants are implied through their absence, rising to the level of the photographer’s very subject matter. The final constitutive component of the streetscapes is their focus on urban centers. Guided by Struth’s stated intention to photograph the locations “which expressed most clearly the nature of the city,” the scenes, stripped down to their bare bones of urban structure, accentuate a city’s accumulated history.3 At the same time, the qualities of the central perspective highlight the unique characteristics of a place from one image to the next. With the goal of narrowing his focus to a single location that could “summarize a city,” Struth continued to explore urban areas, believing “that certain areas of the city have an emblematic character” that “express the city’s structure.”4 Although he eventually left the central perspectives behind, over the next two and a half decades, Struth continued to seek quintessential urban spaces around the world, photographing cities across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. While the paradigmatic coalescence of street and photographic centers in the foundational series appears natural, the central perspective describes a unique, deceptively simple constructed positioning. On closer inspection, Struth’s foundational images do not as much repeat a single approach as yield two variants conjoined under the monocle of the central perspective. The photographs develop along two distinct tendencies, with one variant accentuating the orthogonality of the frame while the other stresses the opening out of the oblique building planes. Illustrating the first tendency is “Crosby Street,” whose horizontal and vertical elements reiterate the photograph’s rectilinear border. Appearing in the cross street that horizontally divides the photograph, as well as in the buildings that line its center, emphasis is capped by a string of iron fire escapes that overlay a fine filigree of vertical lines across the surface of the buildings and into the street.
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