Black White Sailing Prints

Thomas Struth – review

Brooding Edinburgh streets in grey light, jumbles of buildings in Naples, walls of glass and steel in Tokyo, a deserted downtown New York.

No one is looking except us. A city built on sand in Peru that looks as though it is sailing on silt. Suddenly we are plunged into jungles in Australia, Japan and Florida that tangle the eye; unpeopled paradises that have no room for us, only botany gone mad.

More tangles in a Max Planck astrophysics lab, a close-up photograph of wires and metal hoses, the innards of a machine cracked open and exposed, like open-heart surgery.

Then there are the portraits and the people: a panoramic image of crowds gawping, fixated by something we can't see, their eyes raised. Out of shot is Michelangelo's David, towering unseen.

More people, dwarfed by the cliff-like exterior of the cathedral in Milan, and a staged group lingering in the echoing interior of the Pantheon in Rome.

Sometimes Struth shoots what's there, and at other times he choreographs the scene. Here's a man alone, cropped and intrusive – we only see his blurry back, his hand in his pocket – looking at Albrecht Dürer's famous self-portrait in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Dürer, aged 29 and painted 511 years ago, looks back, unperturbed. The man looming beside us is the photographer himself.

Struth, who was born in 1954 and trained in photography in Düsseldorf, began as a painter. It shows – whether in the cool, small, black and white images of city streets, or in the later, and often very large, colour digital prints.

What Struth's photographs demonstrate is range, unending curiosity about the medium and his subjects: Struth's art is about the nature of looking itself, and not just the thing seen, the spectacle or the view. His is not a tourist's eye. He photographs people milling about in front of masterpieces in museums, absorbed in contemplation – and suddenly, we're sucked in too, only to wonder what it is we are staring at.

When Struth captures families crowded in their kitchens and their living rooms, we become aware not just of their poses in front of his camera, but of their interactions with each other, their proximity and distance, how they hold themselves for the photographer, their self-consciousness.

You also see how discreet, coercive and observant he is, how he manages his human subjects and gives them space and time to be themselves or who they think they are.

This is why Struth's portrait of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh is so deft. Visitors to the Whitechapel gallery will be disappointed, as this recent photograph is not shown. But, probably, it would have been be too distracting, drawing too much attention in an exhibition that's full of fascinating, rich, things – even when a photograph shows us not much more than an ordinary street, cars at the kerb and a day waiting to happen.

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