When You're Strange

Some time ago, I was some place else. It was a city, balanced on the edge of a continent, a city whose very name seemed to point elsewhere, a point of transit. It was here, in a disused factory, that I saw a wooden construction, like the hoardings which announce a new development. On its blank face was projected a film of the journey from the city's airport to the exhibition site. The camera looked straight ahead, its movement round corners producing a blind, exaggerated swing. As it approached its destination, the film looped and arrived, instead, at its point of departure. Dislocation, displacement, deferral. These are some of the things I think of when looking at the photographs of Thomas Struth.

'If wandering...is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of 'the stranger' presents the synthesis, as it were, of both of these properties.' 1

It seems that there has always been an understanding of the reciprocity between the individual and the city in which they can be found: the feedback of influence. In the mediaeval city, the church provided the sole example of stability. With the growth of an increasingly secular state, and particularly the advance of high capitalism, the worth of something, whether it be a building or a person, was thought to be less inherent to their nature (or less connected to their accumulated history) than determined by market flux. Solidity gave way to exchange - an insecurity which led to an increased fracturing of identity. As Louis Wirth described in his essay 'Urbanism as a Way of Life': 'The heightened mobility of the individual...brings him toward the acceptance of instability and insecurity in the world at large as a norm.' 2

The segmented Self which Wirth exposes has lost the unity of Enlightenment Man and has become instead, subject to modification and mutability. His Cartesian certainty lost, the subject functions like capital within the flows of exchange, identity becoming established only in movement. (People are no longer citizens, they're passengers in transit'- Paul Virilio). It is these places without centre, these islands of identity, in both the city and the individual, that we find in Struth's photographs.

But let us look again at the images, perhaps the early ones of New York, of Hofgraben, München (1981) or Rue Saint Antoine, Paris (1979). If these are sites of oscillation, why do they appear so stable? If these are the homes of the segmented, why do they seem so complete? These are questions caught in confusion. The formal devices used in the images are quite independent from the elements which they order, indeed, they could be said to be indifferent to them. The images centre on compositional arrangements, spaces are occupied momentarily in the crossing of a street, or by a turning car. In Shinju-ku, Tokyo (1986), crowds of pedestrians are poised to negotiate the space of a dozen lanes of traffic. Even as the striped road markings produce a stroboscopic effect (a form of dislocated movement) an arrow, usefully positioned on the overlying viaduct, marks the point of a transitory hub. Even when we find a refuge, it is only temporary, an impermanent isolation. The individual always veers away from the centre, and like the markings on Rue Saint Antoine, moves on to occupy some other space.

It is this singularity of placement which gives central perspective a sense of domination over the space it organises. Perhaps these images share that possessive impulse, the inevitable territorialisation of space. Or perhaps they attempt to guide us through the space, led by uncertainty and the possibilities of the unpredictable. An image such as Crosby Street, New York (1978) allows this kind of movement. We find ourselves in a sun-less SoHo canyon in the city's industrial underbelly. To the right of the road is a car, but it's taking us nowhere. No matter. Out of the play of signs, possibilities begin to emerge (you may find the octagon arresting but my interest lies above it). The directional arrows would appear to determine movement, but the unforeseen displacement of one pointer opens up the space. This shift in direction and its consequent admission of multiplicity creates eddies of uncertainty, spinning thoughts through the space like objects in the wind. Struth accepts the contrariness of these forces, allowing them to exist simultaneously without synthesis.

In this sense, Struth's is a scientific vision, (though not in the way in which this phrase is normally applied, especially by those critical of his work). Such a vision is not the accumulation of concrete facts, but the hesitant questioning of possibilities. It was scientists who made a principle of uncertainty, not artists (indeed, uncertainty could be identified as the true subject of science). Like the engaged scientist, Struth scrutinises the unforeseen emergence, the random mutation because it is only in the exploration of knowledge that advancements are made.

This questioning of process, evident in all Struth's works, was perhaps made most visible in his contribution to the Münster Sculpture Project of 1987. Refusing what he saw as the outmoded monumentality of much public sculpture, Struth opted for the transitory and the immaterial, projecting images of suburban housing onto the public façades on the city centre. It could be argued that Struth's project as a whole is more in debt to one tutor, Daniel Buren, than to those with whom he is more regularly linked. It is through the exchange between space and image, and also the mode of artistic production, that Struth becomes an exile, one who knows, as Edward Said noted, that homes are always provisional. 'Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond needs or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.' 3

In the Passagen-Werken Benjamin had a vision of the city as an interior, the furniture of the street becoming domestic. In echoing such a vision, Struth's contribution to the Münster project was an important development: not only did it clarify the relationships between his other series, but it also connected them with the notion of the interior. Although Family Life, an anthology of five decades of imagery was compiled in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann in 1983-4, it is in his series of family portraits, begun in 1986, that Struth's most sustained examination of interiority can be found. In each case, after an often lengthy period of consultation, the family chooses their own grouping and setting. Although the images often simply consist of a line of people in a domestic environment, a great deal can be gleaned from these photographs about the construction and representation of identity.

If the mediaeval church was once a source of sanctuary then the modern home has become its secular equivalent. As a place of refuge, the domestic interior became a zone of immunity from the Industrial Revolution, providing safety from not only the danger and speed of machines, the penetration of technologies, but also literally providing a space for growth in which children could be raised protected from the corruption of the outside world. It is the spiritual - we might now say psychological - aspect of personal development, however, which is most interesting here. In the protected space of the household, as life outside us slips from our attention, it is the life within us which necessarily replaces it. At home, we are allowed to be what we really are.

This assumption of self-revelation, and consequently of family life free from internal tension, may have diminished in our post-Freudian world, but in a familiar disjunction of what we know and what we believe, faith in the sanctuary of the interior has not been entirely destroyed. These images do not suppress the difficulties of our psychological age, but succeed in amplifying their complexity.

This intensification can be found in an image such as The Horsfield Family, London (1989). The subjects are the photographer Craigie Horsfield, his Polish wife Eva and their son. In a room, they sit on a sofa, positioned against a white wall. In the top left of the frame, flat, bright colours fill a fragment of alphabetic sequence. (This is a place of learning, of development.) We could, perhaps, read a sense of unease in the physical aspects of the sitters, but I think that would be wrong. The subjects betray, instead, a confidence, in themselves and in the photographer, a confidence which requires no diversionary tactics, no false spontaneity. (Of course, this particular family recognises the seriousness of photographic representation.) We may look at this image with pieces of biography flowing through our thoughts. We may be reminded of migration, of movement between countries, between cultures, between languages, of the dislocation of time, the displacement of lives, the deferral of imagery. All these things move between these people, within each person, without fracturing the overwhelming coherence of the image.

It is important to understand what is occurring here, for it is a process which is central, I think, to the workings of Struth's imagery. In this photograph, the child is pivotal, in both the production of meaning and the composition of elements. Seated centrally, he connects his parents, yet he does not simply become their synthesis any more than he exists as some autonomous third item. Struth allows him to be both simultaneously. This irreducible play of relations cannot be overcome by the imposition of an external coherence. This is true of all his sitters, each displaying wholeness of Self while acknowledging its fracture, each demonstrating the stability of family life while underlining the uncertainty of personal relations. Like the image of Crosby Street, this photograph records the space of a meeting, where the passage of history intersects with trails of thought, the irreducible encounter of simultaneity.

Thomas Struth's may be an urban art, but it is also an urbane art. As pronouncements on the authorless image accumulate into a signature style, Struth is less certain. His signing of the The Horsfield Family, London in the top left of the photograph, stutters to a stop almost as it starts. His art eschews histrionics and 'refuses to astonish and entertain with grotesqueries, extravagant one-liners, promises of Armageddon'4. Instead, it quietly allows itself to be seen, its politeness only emphasising its enigmatic status as a stranger. It is this identity which may be found in an image such as The Hirose Family, Hiroshima (1987).

Here, once more, we are confronted by faces, in fact, if one includes the portrait on the far wall and a couple of 'primitive' masks, by more faces than bodies. The room appears to be a kind of study, the papers and journals on the table in the foreground stacked in a manner which suggests the criss-crossing of textual reference. (This is a place of learning, of development.) A single sheet of paper balances over the edge of the table and, in one of those strange collapses of space which occur in two-dimensional representation, is held in place by the feet of a young girl who is herself balancing, on the knees of another. On the right, a smart gentleman sits on the arm of a sofa, his jacket opening slightly to reveal a pen in his inner left-hand pocket. Behind him, on the desk next to the telephone, sits a PC.

In many ways, despite sharing the same, simple format, this image is even more complex than that of the Horsfield family, if only because of the increased number of sitters. Complexity to the power of three. It is because of this rise in numbers that we begin to relate to these people in a new way, as members of a crowd. It is within the crowd, in the presence of strangers, that we may share closeness without entering into intimacy, acknowledge presence without requiring revelation. It is within these unspoken relations, and not the technology of electronic prostheses, that these people are in contact with the outside world.

If we must define Struth's achievement, it is that he is able to simultaneously photograph each person separately and as a member of a group. Indeed, it is possible to expand that definition to include his images of cities because in these too, he achieves a comparable effect. Looked at in this way, the Hirose family demonstrate the rise and fall of buildings within a street, their faces becoming distinct yet related façades (I'm reminded in particular of Struth's image of an arcade, Prinzipalmarkt, Münster (1986), in which window heights slide up and down and the pediments never quite seem to repeat). It is the most architectural of portraits and one which, given the city in which it was taken, brings a more grotesque synthesis of the human and the architectural to mind - the nuclear etching of bodies onto walls.

In discussing his early student work, Struth remarked that his interest lay in research, of discovering something of which he was previously unaware, rather than simply projecting that which he already knew. This process can even be found in his most recent images, of flowers and plants, in which the flora become almost like specimens, newly discovered, not fresh, not 'natural', but somehow free from the weight of symbolic association. This instability of knowledge is perhaps more explicit in examples other than those already mentioned. His Neapolitan images, for instance, owe more to the cut-and-paste Metropolis of Paul Citroën than the legacy of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Similarly, the semiotic and informational exchanges which pulse through his images of Tokyo reminds us of what Tokyo originally reminded Barthes - that the rational is but one system amongst many. But these are interpretational wars easily won and so soon forgotten, points which would, in their highlighting, be transformed into exceptions to a falsely implied rule. Instead, it is through a process of dislocation, of displacement and of deferral that Struth interrogates our place within our constructed world and forces us to recognise that we are, in another's words, strangers to ourselves.