Among the eighteen photographers featured in the recent show
Constructing Worlds at the Barbican
Centre in London I want to reflect for a moment on the work of the German
artist Thomas Struth. Struth forms part
of an influential circle of former students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the
Düsseldorf Academy where significant advances were made in the use of large
format black and white photographs to record the scale and detail of urban and
industrial landscapes.
One of Struth’s photograph stands out for me in particular, entitled
Clinton Road, London (1977), which
captures a wide-angle view of an empty London street, perhaps on a Sunday
morning so as to be as unobtrusive as possible (save for a possible curtain
twitch to the left). In a series of
photos taken in the late 1970s in several cities—among them Brussels, Cologne,
and New York—Struth sought to distil the essence of an entire city into a single
image. In the case of London this is no
easy task. Nevertheless, this street is
instantly recognizable as an example of the type of turn of the century terrace
housing that dominates many of London’s newly built suburbs of the late
nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries.
There is a studied ordinariness to this image that captures something of
the enigma of London as a city.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to notice what is taken for granted. Like the Danish architect Steen Eiler
Rasmussen achieved, with his marvellous book London: the unique city, first published in 1934, Struth has also managed
in the field of photography with his carefully chosen location. That this image is a large format image,
with all the skill and technical complexity that that entails, merely adds to
its poignancy. And with the use of black-and-white rather than colour, the image seems to be both closer in time and yet
simultaneously further away.
Thomas Struth, Clinton Road, London (1977)
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