Human marks

Summary

Nature & Politics is the title Thomas Struth has chosen for the highly concentrated exhibition of his work from the past decade. What might be encompassed under this title? At first sight, the label ‘nature’ is not that problematic. There are an infinite number of forms of nature, of natura naturata, that can be represented, and this is indeed something photographers have done ever since photography was invented. However, one swiftly realizes that what Struth has in mind are not landscape images in the conventional sense. It is less evident whether and how you can show images of ‘politics’. Its institutions take material form as architecture and that can be photographed. And of course one can also portray the people active in politics. But it is equally clear that in such images ‘politics’ per se is not visible. In the case of a reflective artist such as Thomas Struth we can therefore assume that he understands the title Nature & Politics at a more fundamental level and that his work of recent years consciously seeks to dig deeper. Nature and politics? The first question we must ask ourselves is how these images address the topic. Their sober precision forgoes any effects. What we see is what we see. Places where science and technology are advanced, where research and experimentation take place, where things get tested, examined, measured, monitored and evaluated: laboratories, nature on science's test bench. A basin with greenish yellow water, with smoke billowing over it, at the University of Edinburgh; a highly complicated measuring system at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin; a kind of robot workshop at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Struth's images show us these situations and the captions point tersely to what it is we are seeing. However, as one swiftly discerns, the initial explanation given by the plain captions, the plausible grounds thus created, do not really get you much further. Which is also why Thomas Struth does not trust captions. What an image means is not grasped simply by knowing what it shows. For Struth is not engaging here in documentary photographs that simply seek to place something in an optimal light and are exhausted in the representation of the factual. The factual, the subject matter, stands for something different.