Paradise: Thomas Struth

Another piece of work colleagues suggested I looked at was Paradise by Thomas Struth.  Struth was born in 1954 and is a German photographer best known for his Museum Photographs, family portraits and 1970s monochrome images taken in Dusseldorf and New York.  He divides his time between Berlin and New York.  Although not primarily a landscape photographer, Struth began searching for jungle settings throughout the world.  His first eight large-format Pictures from Paradise were made in 1998 in the Daintree Forest in Australia.  Struth first began thinking of forest images in 1996 and even planned an installation with several images surrounding the viewer.  After Daintree he made more work in Yunnan province in China, on the island of Yakushima in Japan, and in the forests of Bavaria, Germany, in 1999.  New Pictures from Paradise became the title for an exhibition of the first 19 images at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York in 1999.  He was interested in the kinds of observation, contemplation or experience that the images could generate rather than being botanical images or a cry for a lost past.  He felt that it was a melancholy reflection at the turn of the millenium.  The work continued in other parts of the world and by 2010 comprised 36 works, all on a large scale.  While a small number of the images adhere to classic picturesque style many position the viewer before a screen of greenery that includes a great deal of detail without any traditional compositional style.  The viewer sees a forest or jungle but there is no story to be told; they are more to do with reflection, perhaps mirroring his interest in reflective meditational Tai Chi.

Public Delivery Website suggests that the title gives the images a special meaning as pictures of nature before the fall of man, referencing and questioning representations of paradise throughout history and cultures.

These images are certainly not minimalist.  They are full of detail.  I image that when seen full size they would be overwhelming and the viewer could spend a great deal of time on each poring of this vast amount of detail.  They are nearly monochromatic and could, perhaps be used as a meditation device in the same way as a Hindu or Buddhist manadala.  Struth's work is similar to mine in that he used it as a means to transport viewers into a realm of quiet self-contemplation; exactly words that I have used about my BOW and what I feel when I walk through woods.

References

Public Delivery (2017) Thomas Struth's Jungle Pictures May Make You Feel Helpless [online] Public Delivery. Available from: http://publicdelivery.org/thomas-struth-paradise/ [Accessed 07/02/17]

Tate (2017) Thomas Struth [online] Tate. Available from:
 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/thomas-struth-2339 [Accessed 07/02/17]

Struth, T. (2010) New Pictures From Paradise [online] Thomas Struth. Available from:
http://www.thomasstruth32.com/smallsize/photographs/new_pictures_from_paradise/index.html#