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August 5, 2011
The urban landscape work of the late 1970s Düsseldorf-based photographer Thomas Struth consisted of a series of empty, almost anonymous streets, which he has referred to as “unconscious places”. These render the street as void yet present the void as a concrete visual experience.
Thomas Struth, Sophiengemeinde 1, Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, Berlin 1992.
Melissa Miles in Donna MF Brett in The Uncanny Return: Documenting place in post-war German photography in Photographies (no. 3, Issue 1, 2010) says that:
In the series of street photographs Struth places the observer in the role of the Ausländer (foreigner or stranger) when our eyes are opened to the “fleeting impressions” of the city via the map or the lens of the camera, traversing the landscape from one street sign to another in a form of Kracauer-like self-estrangement. Struth's typological repetition of vacant streets becomes the images of our half-awakened wanderings and memories of streets once known, familiar but strange, or of streets we encounter in glimpses as we lose our way.
The absence of people in a city like Berlin is unsettling --given the evidence of life: multiple bullet holes and shrapnel wounds on the surface of the building and the chalked graffiti notations and messages on doorways. Yet emptiness and absence predominate
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