Thomas Struth Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

How should we judge what we see? More intimately, let us consider the vulnerability of the human body and soul under these circumstances. It’s all creation. It’s made. It’s not a given.

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.

[I]n 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.