After a hard day’s sightseeing, your attention can wander. Too often in front of some icon of Western art you realise that your gaze has slid from its exquisite surface to rest instead on a large couple sporting matching bumbags, scrutinising a floorplan.
These people are the subject of the opening images in Thomas Struth’s first solo show in London for nearly 20 years. Over several years, the German-born Struth skulked in great museums across the world, photographing people looking at art. The art here is secondary to the humanity before it.
Struth’s interest is, very broadly, in the spaces people create for themselves. He works in series: in addition to the museum photographs, he is known for his cityscapes, and recently he has shot sites of high technology. All are represented here, along with New Pictures from Paradise (images of jungles, the only exception to the human rule in his work); gatherings of people around impressive historic, religious or natural sites; and his family photographs, in which he allows each family group to arrange themselves in their own domestic interior, thereby picking up the tensions and alliances inherent in all families.
Here the series are jumbled up, ostensibly to highlight the connections between them, though these aren’t always obvious. The contrast is sharp however, between the images of cheerful humanity milling around great works of art and architecture (I particularly liked one man on the steps of Milan cathedral, shirtless and taking in the sun) and the cold confusion in Struth’s pictures of machines such as the Tokamak Askex Upgrade Periphery (no idea). Mind-scrambling messes of wires and equipment, it’s hard even to tell from which angle these unimaginably complicated systems are shot. They question, Struth has said, our “one-sided investment in technology and science as the promised better future”. They may be made by humans, but they exclude us.
In the galleries upstairs, as well as the always fascinating family portraits, are the cityscapes. Struth is enchanted by the layers of history that make up a city — these pictures, from Lima, New York, Dusseldorf, are deliberately devoid of people, accentuating the rich architectural fabric. But he is also concerned with the human urge to expand — his vast images from Ulsan, South Korea, show an Identikit city, growing high-rise by high-rise, as if made of Lego, and encroaching on the greenery beyond. An installation of his Paradise pictures, of entirely natural habitats, rams the ecological point home.
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These are impressive, fascinating photographs. They are thoughtful, beautifully composed, and zing with clarity and colour. But they take time to read. This is not a show where the other viewers can be your focus.
Runs to September 18. Sponsors: Christie’s and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen