And if photography were the imaginary story of that reality that lies ahead. Even the container of everything that has invisible what we are seeing. Thomas Struth (Geldem, Germany, 1954) came to photography from the edge of the painting. He contacted Gerard Richter, a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, and then with the photographers Hilla and Bern Becher when he turned his eyes to the cameras and stayed to live in that space .

Around those professors the School of Düsseldorf was articulated, with Candida Hoffer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky ... A new concept of photography was taking place. And Struth, of all of them, assumed the most unique path. In his first works, at the end of the 70s, he registered hundreds of empty streets. He didn't care so much about the human being as his footprints. The echo of his absence. «The photographs of the human figure are usually anecdotal, in addition to the majority lacking historical strength. And that doesn't happen with architecture, for example, ”he says. Amid the turbulence of an empty street in Berlin, New York, Naples, Tokyo or Jerusalem, Struth recognizes the world.

'Zebra', photography by Thomas Struth.

In the 80s he also began to portray museums inside. Then people watching the works in the museums. And later, he set the technological evolution at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. He also portrayed natural spaces, dead animals and families . All are ecosystems, lively and inanimate. «My interest in photography does not come from the history of this expression, but through my parents' family albums. Every time I opened them there were many questions in the environment. Between what they had told me and the images they kept there was a vacuum. That was what I wanted to investigate, ”says Struth. His father was seriously injured twice in World War II and "fought on the wrong side."

Struth generates his work spaces. Sometimes epic and other intimate. The large format and definition of the image generates moments of restlessness, of strange complicity, of loss. One of his images from the series on museums, a scene from the Pantheon, reached one million dollars at auction . At that time he became the most sought-after live photographer. He lives it with some distance, with lazy astonishment. Among his exploits is also to be the first contemporary photographer to exhibit at the Prado Museum. And this is the first time that the Guggenheim Bilbao dedicates a retrospective -400 pieces, with its archive- to a graphic artist, open until next January.

Struth, obsessive, patient, away from the random concept of "decisive moment" of Cartier-Bresson , is interested in everything that happens in those who look at something. In who observes. What does it leave in that look. What is irretrievably carried. How we learn to be social animals. And how his photography can be a time warp, a question, a challenge, a nostalgia. A stillness that is not explained otherwise. A form of beauty

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