Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics - In Conversation with Aaron Schuman
by Aaron Schuman
Spring 2019

This interview was originally published in Aperture: #234 - "Earth", Spring 2019

Thomas Struth: I’m sorry I’m a little bit late—I’ve just come from a funeral.


Aaron Schuman: I’m sorry to hear that. Were you close to the person?

TS: She was a neighbor who lived in our building, upstairs. She’d just turned fifty, and was the mother of two kids. She was East German—very sporty, very active, and was kind of a life force. My experiences with many people who were born in East Germany is that they are very natural in a way, in their whole demeanor, because they didn’t grow up with advertising and these glossy role models that put psychological pressure on them. It’s completely different from capitalist societies. They have this kind ofjoie de vivre, because the main thing that they enjoy is other people—being connected. At the funeral, there were maybe three hundred people or so.

AS: It’s interesting that you used the word natural to describe the East German mentality. That comment seems to reflect something about your psychological perspective, your photography in general, and, more particularly, how you scrutinize the world in your recent body of work, Nature & Politics (2008–2015?)

TS: There are many categories of influence within human existence that could be scrutinized — there’s the physical, the social, the political, the psychological, and so on. In a sense, the psychological field is difficult to read or to treat within the category of science — there’s a desire to approach it from a scientific perspective, and it’s much studied in this way, but still it’s not so clear. Nevertheless, it’s important. When you look at people like Donald Trump, or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or [the far-right German politician] Alexander Gauland, you can’t help but think, What’s going on inside them psychologically? How can they walk the path that they’re walking on? In a way, it’s like dark matter. It is dark matter.

AS: Your works have often been read and interpreted from political, environmental, and sociological perspectives, but do you feel that this psychological component is just as vital in terms of the way you work?

TS: Yes. I believe that psychology comes into it when I consider things like: What am I attracted to? What’s my subject matter? What’s my longing? What do I choose to evaluate? That’s very important to me — what you could also label as intuition. When I read art — for example, when I look at Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings or a Mark Rothko — I partly understand them as a psychological network. Psychology is a big component in terms of evaluating my perception of what I’m looking at, and also in terms of what I want the viewer to see.

AS: How do you initially determine what to photograph, and then how do you decide how to photograph it?

TS: When I started to photograph, at the age of twenty or so, I was still painting, and I chose to photograph things that had a lot to do with me. I was a student, walking to and from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf a lot, and I was lonely. I’d just left home and was looking for new friends, a new environment, and a place in the world. This was in postwar Germany, so I was walking in this scattered environment that was very heterogeneous — it wasn’t like Paris or New York.

AS: There wasn’t a predetermined logic to the environment, in terms of how it was organized.

TS: No, there wasn’t a determined logic, so I was living in this sort of ruptured place. For my generation, there was a strong focus on the individual, and the idea that you can transform yourself through life and experiences. But because the environment was ruptured, you couldn’t find consistency, you couldn’t escape yourself, and you couldn’t be sentimental, so it offered the opportunity to look at the world in a more objectifying manner. The quest and challenge was always to figure out what is really closest to me, or what comes up from inside me, and then try to look at and experiment with it in relation to the outside world in an unsentimental way.

For example, the apartment I was living in was on an elevated ground floor; it had a terrace in the back that looked into the communal space, lots of trees, everybody’s gardens, and so on. I often sat outside — eating breakfast or dinner, or just reading—and I would look into the structure of the branches and the trees. I began to think it would be interesting to photograph that, to have a picture plane with a lot of structures within it. At the time, it was just an intuitive curiosity and developed from something emotional.

But years later, I decided to photograph forests and jungles for a series called Paradise (1998–2007). I had several previously scheduled trips on my agenda, including one to Australia, where I was participating in the 1998 Biennale of Sydney. I looked at the map and saw that there was a jungle in the northeast of the country, in Daintree, Queensland, so I started there. Then I had a trip to Japan, and another to China, and each time I made sure to go to a forest or jungle to photograph.

So that’s one body of work that started intuitively, without me really knowing at the beginning why I was doing it. And to be honest, at first I was worried that people might think that it was just jungle wallpaper. But after I returned from Australia, I made a big print and hung it on the wall of my apartment, and I really liked it — still not knowing why, not really knowing how I got there, but just deciding intuitively that I liked it.

AS: In retrospect, do you think that your positive response to that print was based on its aesthetics, or was it something more emotional or psychological?

TS: It was both. I liked the fascination of identifying certain compositions in an environment where millions of compositions are possible, 360 degrees around me at any one point. And then, when I started to show these works in galleries, I hung several of them in one room, on every wall around. I realized that the effect it had was very quieting — almost meditative. The more I thought about it and showed it in this manner, the more I realized that this work was about nonidentification — just being.

There was a period of time, in the 1990s, when I was experimenting with different kinds of therapy, trying different types of meditation, and doing a lot of “journeys into the self.” I went to a therapist in Wiesbaden who worked a lot with breathing, and it became about being in a room without doing anything—just silently being. Also, when I was in my early thirties — maybe in 1986 — through a connection with close friends, I started to practice tai chi with a Chinese grand master, which I did for about twelve years. He died about two years ago. In a way, that is also somehow connected, because when you do tai chi, it’s a set of very slow movements that don’t have an immediate purpose. But when you do something very slow, you become extremely aware of every position, and of the connection between your own body, your mind, and the space around you.

AS: Would you describe your photographic process in a similar way?

TS: Practicing tai chi for a long time definitely sharpened my perception in certain ways, because I became very aware of being in and moving through space; it helped me become more alert to very minute differences.

Also, on one of my trips to Japan, in the 1980s, I said to my host, “I’d be interested in learning more about archery.” I wasn’t really being that serious, but before I knew it I had an appointment with a teacher, and, for a week, I spent every day with him, from morning to evening, learning about Japanese archery. Eventually they asked me, “Do you know of the German philosophy professor Eugen Herrigel?” He was in Japan in the 1920s, taught philosophy, practiced archery, and wrote this book called Zen in the Art of Archery (1948). At the time, I hadn’t heard of him; I bought his book, and since then I’ve given it to at least fifteen or twenty people. The connection between the “goal” or the “target” and yourself was fascinating to me; somehow I thought about the camera as the ultimate pointing of the bow.

AS: And at one particular moment, when you most strongly feel that connection, you choose to release the arrow — or the shutter.

TS: I found the idea very interesting: in order to make a photographic picture that speaks, you have to become the subject. You have to really love what you’re looking at, and become one with it for that moment. You have to release yourself completely to that subject. I mean, it’s a bit idealized—I don't want to dramatize it too much — but when I read that book, I thought: That’s true. There’s something there I identified with a lot.

AS: Many people talk about that experience of feeling “one with” something in relation to nature. But do you feel that experience translates to when you’re photographing a scientific laboratory or research facility as well, as you have been doing in recent years? When you’re faced with man-made environments and technology, can you still get into that headspace?

TS: Not really. My interest in technology was mainly driven by a feeling that there’s a general, almost obsessive conviction about the advantages of technological progress, and an unwavering belief in the promises made by technology. I’m not against the development of technology in general, but society’s blind conviction in terms of its benefits could potentially be very dangerous if sociopolitical development remains so far behind, as it is happening right now. Technology is moving forward at the speed of light, but within the sociopolitical fields, and in terms of human coexistence, we are marching backward. I thought it would be interesting to make pictures that show this obsession with scientific progress — to look at the technologies and these elaborate scientific spaces as a representation of a mind-set. I’m trying to identify pictures that communicate their presence in the real world.

A shared phenomenon and principle in all fields of research and science is that people have to be extremely focused—they have to imagine and then explore unknown territories, squeezing them through a small pinhole in order to come up with a conclusion. It’s like a riddle, and, in order to solve it, they build these crazy environments that cost billions of euros, and spend forty or fifty years working on it until they find a solution — if they ever find one.

 That said, in doing so, they also have to come together and work at the same table — Japanese, Chinese, Germans, Ukrainians, Americans, Israelis, Romanians, Australians, Africans. That is fantastic, and we could ask ourselves why that’s so much more difficult in political or humanitarian spheres. Look at the United Nations: Donald Trump stands before the U.N. and says every nation should think of themselves. What kind of signal is that, especially given the situation we’re now in with respect to the environment? It’s crazy.

AS: Given what you’ve seen, experienced, and learned while making Nature & Politics, is climate change of particular concern to you?

TS: Well, the question is: Can we save the globe or not? And, if so, what are we doing to save it? We all have the same problem and must act globally — it’s an opportunity to be more united than ever before. Part of my desire to make work about science and technology was also to open doors and show the power of collective efforts. Maybe this is naive, but you have to have a reason to work.

AS: How do you initially explain your artistic intentions to the people who work within the scientific facilities that you photograph?

TS: I’ve encountered a huge amount of generosity, and what I found is that, like artists, scientists and researchers are working toward the unknown. I would say I often found an akin mentality.

AS: In Nature & Politics, alongside the photographs you’ve made in research facilities and scientific laboratories, you also include pictures that you’ve taken of the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California. What is the relationship between all of these works?

TS: That thought process started with an article about Walt Disney, which I read in a German newspaper about eight or nine years ago. At the time, I was thinking about how the movie industry today — with all its digital technology — can create realistic-looking footage of anything that one imagines. I started thinking about Disneyland looking like an archaic moment in the history of fantasy creation. Of course, since the beginning of film, there has been science fiction — Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, and so on. The original Disneyland had something to do with imagination, memory turning into sculpture, and I thought it would be interesting to try to let today’s technology setups and Disney associatively play with each other.

AS: When paired with the images of scientific research, these photographs force one to reevaluate some of your technology pictures through the lens of fantasy and science fiction. All of a sudden, things like Solaris (1972), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or even the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) become reference points too.

TS: Yes, absolutely. But I never think about it as science fiction. I think more about it as the individual words — science and fiction — and how the two things are so closely intertwined. For example, in the photograph of the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, the mountain is clearly not the real Matterhorn, so what does it show us? It’s an embodiment of Disney’s fascination with traveling in Europe, being overwhelmed by a natural phenomenon, and creating a papier-mâché masquerade of that experience for others. When you’re looking at laboratories and scientific research centers, if you don’t know exactly what these machines and environments are doing, they offer us an opportunity to ask, What do they tell us as an atmospheric entity about humankind’s aspirations, obsessions, entanglements? Again, I’m not against technology, but there is always a political agenda in place as well, which is what I question and try to make art about.

AS: In a sense, your intentions and motivations are both political and personal.

TS: Yes. In recent photography, the personal and private have become so dominant — through Instagram, social media, and photographers who have been very successful in celebrating their private lives. I find this a bit boring. In the history of art, everything that has survived from any culture was not art that remained within the private sphere.

Since the end of 2016, I’ve been photographing dead animals at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. I maybe wanted to do this partly because I’m getting older, people around me are starting to die, and the limits of life have become more apparent to me than they used to be. The subject matter here is something that touches me and comes from my inner thoughts, but is also more generally about humankind at large.

AS: Looking back at your overall oeuvre, this new body of work that you’re making at the Leibniz Institute seems to take a very different approach, at least aesthetically.

TS: Yes. It’s very different, and I’m surprised myself. That said, I have made work within the medical field in recent years—in relation to technology’s response to sickness and disease — so I had already come close to death as a subject matter. I never felt like photographing dead people, however, because this would always be a specific individual. When it’s a dead bear or zebra, it’s more of an “animal” or “soul.”

AS: Do you see these photographs as being along the lines of memento mori?

TS: The work is definitely in line with the history of memento mori. Maybe twenty years ago, I was in Milan at the Pinacoteca di Brera and was quite struck by Andrea Mantegna’s fabulous painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483). The body has this gesture of a complete absence of tension, which kept coming back to my mind. I’m still in the process of slowly making this work.

AS: Last week you were photographing the corpse of a black jaguar at the Leibniz Institute. Do you feel that this particular picture was successful?

TS: I think so, but I haven’t edited the results yet. I made one picture from directly above, but then tried something else. Like in the Mantegna painting, I went very low and photographed the jaguar from a very short perspective—I wanted to concentrate on its face — and, in the back of the picture, you can see the legs of the lab tables, as well as the feet of some of the people who were standing there. The gesture of the animal’s body means a lot. With only a little change to the camera position, the body suddenly looks like it’s jumping or falling. Very minute reorchestrations of perspective completely change how the animal appears in the frame. It’s very peculiar to be in the presence of death.