National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Thomas Struth, artist, in conversation with Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Thomas Struth was born in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He first studied painting with Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf before turning to photography in 1976 and becoming one of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s earliest students. In the late 1970s he began to make a series of black-and-white photographs of empty urban environments that established his international reputation. In the late 1980s he conceived another series, the Museum Photographs, where he photographed in some of the world’s most celebrated museums. These large color pictures, often depicting crowds of people, explore the different functions that art fulfills in our modern, secularized world and the ways in which people experience paintings today, including the notion of the museum as a sacred pilgrimage site. As his int