South Lake Street Apartments 3, Chicago

Thomas Struth

1990 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Struth began his survey of cities in his native Düsseldorf, Germany, but it was on a scholarship to New York in 1978 that he found an ideal combination of conceptual order and practical chaos to hone his rigorous vision. Avoiding subjectivity through a centralized viewpoint and comparative technique, Struth catalogued, with clarity and dispassion, the unselfconscious structures that characterize a culture—the irreducible mélange of textures, shapes, and the scale of its streets. During the 1980s Struth expanded his project to include many cities in Western Europe, America, and Asia. He also abandoned one-point perspective and serial comparison in order to locate meaning within individual images rather than between them, creating distinctive portraits of place that chart the historical transformations affecting our urban environments.

Artist

Thomas Struth

Date

1990

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1995