Quotes by
Thomas Struth

Ideally, my photography is a political appeal. I take photos mainly as a way of speaking in public about what intrests me. The camera is like a Geiger counter, it indicates the prosence or absence of radiation. It scans and registers what someone pointing the camera sees in front of it and has selected. To that extend it appears rather harmless.

The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.

In certain cases, I asked people to stay fixed in their position, but the effect was already lost. Those photographs don’t work, because photography is so sensitive a medium that one can’t lie using it.

[When] I am taking a photograph, I am conscious that I am constructing images rather than taking snapshots. Since I do not take rapid photographs it is in this respect like a painting which takes a long time where you are very aware of what you are doing in the process. Exposure is only the final act of making the image as a photograph.

The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.

If I look at my work from the beginning it is more the idea of trying to establish a kind of material that one can work with for the future, rather than making nostalgic images to record something that will later become lost.

Many people think that the impulse to take a photograph comes from the subject matter. But, for me, it comes from a wish to talk about certain things that fascinate or bother me, politically or socially. And then I choose the subject that will enable me to address that subject. Otherwise, I would go around aimlessly photographing anything and everything.

I wanted to make photographs in which everything was so complex and detailed that you could look at them forever and never see everything.

I’m interested in photographs that have no personal signature.

In general, my work is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about re-investing it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography had from the beginning of its existence.

The image of an empty landscape accommodates the medium of photography in so far as it always involves the present, despite being historically referential.

The word “series” is a diminutive attachment. A series is something that pretends as if one picture has no value and you need the series to give it that value. You wouldn’t say, for instance, that James Joyce wrote “a series of books.”

For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process.