Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  After lunch, we returned to the factory and Struth went back to his strenuous labors under the photographer’s cloth, with Hirsch hovering nearby, performing his assisting functions when Struth signaled for them. He worked through the afternoon and into the evening hours. The time set for us to drive to Dresden for the night went by, but he showed no signs of quitting. Ulrike Just was staying after hours—she had been told to stay as long as Struth wanted to work. I tried to busy myself by taking pictures with my Instamatic camera. Finally, I rather crossly left for Dresden in a taxi.

  Of course, my crossness was unjustified. I had wanted to see a master photographer at work and had just had the chance to do so. Struth’s invisible cloth of obliviousness was as necessary to his art making as the actual cloth he worked under. To enter the state of absorption in which art is made requires reserves of boorishness that not every exquisitely courteous person can summon but that the true artist unhesitatingly draws on.

  The next day, Struth, his courtliness restored, and I walked around Dresden and talked about his project of taking photographs at industrial and scientific workplaces. I asked him if he felt he was making some sort of “statement” about society with these photographs.

  “I think yes,” he said, but he added, “Some of the pictures don’t show what I was thinking. For instance, when I went to Cape Canaveral as a tourist, I was struck with the sense of the space program as an instrument of power. When, as a state, you demonstrate that you are able to do that, it contributes to cultural dominance. I hadn’t realized this before. But when I went there to photograph I saw that it is something you cannot put into a photograph.”

  “Do you feel you need to put large meanings into your work?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s part of my thinking. It’s something that stimulates me. To have a narrative is an incentive. If it was only about composition and light and beautiful pictures, I could just photograph flowers.”

  “Forget the flowers,” I said. “Let’s stay in the factory. Because there were very beautiful forms there. Wouldn’t that be enough for you? If you just found beautiful compositions there and made beautiful photographic abstractions. You want to do more than that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m trying to elicit from you what the more is.”

  “The more is a desire to melt, like to—how can I say it?—be an antenna for a part of our contemporary life and to give this energy, put that into parts of this narrative of visual, of sort of symbolic visual expression . . .” Struth struggled, and gave up.

  I asked him if the fact that SolarWorld’s activity had to do with solar energy was part of his interest in photographing there.

  He said that it was, and added, “My own personal energy account is very bad, because I fly so often and drive, and can’t claim that I’m a good sustainable-energy person. But I’ve almost always voted for the Green Party, and since it was founded, I always thought these subjects were important and are a fascinating challenge for the world.”

  “How will your pictures show that what is being produced at SolarWorld is good for mankind?”

  “Just by the title.”

  “So photographs don’t speak.”

  “The picture itself is powerless to show.”

  That afternoon, we flew to Düsseldorf, where Struth has lived and worked for most of his life. He recently moved his living quarters to Berlin and was about to move his studio there as well. But Düsseldorf has been the center of his artistic life since he entered its Kunstakademie, in 1973, and studied first with the painter Gerhard Richter and then with the photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher. He entered the academy as a student of painting. The paintings he has preserved from this period show a penchant for surrealist creepiness—they depict looming landscapes and sinister people and are painted in a precise, Magritte-like style. After two and a half years, Richter proposed that Struth go and study with the Bechers. Struth had started photographing as an aid to his painting. He would photograph people on the street, who became the haunted figures in his paintings, as well as the streets themselves, in early-morning de Chirico emptiness. His paintings became more realistic, and cost him more effort, and, as they did so, he had an epiphany. “I realized, this takes too long,” he said over lunch in a Düsseldorf café. “And that I’m not interested in the painting process. I’m interested in making pictures. And if I’m not interested in spending time accurately rendering the shadows in the coat and getting the color of the hat right and stuff like that, I realized—”

  “You realized that someone else or, rather, something else—a camera—could do this for you?” I cut in, imagining the eureka moment.

  “Yes. After I started taking photographs from which I would make my paintings, I realized that the photograph already does it. The photograph already shows what I want to show. So why make a painting that takes me five months to finish and then it looks like a photograph?”

  “That’s what the photo-realists did,” I said.

  “Yes, but that’s naive. I remember when I first saw those paintings, I thought, That’s not very interesting. They are only trying to show they can paint. That’s not art.”

  Struth, of course, was mischaracterizing the photo-realist project—which was not to display painterly skills but to cast a cold eye on the psychopathology of mid-twentieth-century American life. The huge paintings of Airstream campers and gooey pies on luncheonette counters brought the details of the color photographs they were based on to an arresting, sometimes almost comical degree of visibility. These paintings were about scale—in much the way that the oversize photographs of Struth, Gursky, Wall, Höfer, et al. are—and in this sense they anticipated the new photography, though they were evidently not a conscious influence on the new photographers.

  Recalling his student days, Struth spoke of the atmosphere of seriousness that permeated the academy: “When I came there, it was a shock to realize that I had to regard art as a serious activity and develop a serious artistic practice. Painting and drawing was no longer my hobby, a private activity that I enjoyed. It was something that had categories. Artists were people who took positions and represented certain social and political attitudes. It was an intense experience to realize this. There was very intense judgment by the students—who is doing something interesting and who is an idiot painting lemons as if he were living in the time of Manet and Cézanne.”

  In a 1976 student exhibition at the academy, Struth showed forty-nine of the black-and-white photographs he had taken of empty Düsseldorf streets from a frontal perspective leading to a vanishing point, and the success of the series led to a scholarship in New York, where he did the work for which he was first known—black-and-white photographs of empty New York streets, again taken head-on. The assumption that these single-minded works were inspired by the Bechers’ über-single-minded photographs of industrial structures turns out to be wrong. As it happens, when Struth took his Düsseldorf pictures, he had not yet seen the Bechers’ photographs—another example of the zeitgeist’s uncanny ways.

  The Bechers are cult figures, known in the photography world for their “typologies” of water towers, gas tanks, workers’ houses, winding towers, and blast furnaces, among other forms of the industrial vernacular. In the late fifties, they began going around Germany, and then around the world, taking the same frontal portrait of each example of the type of structure under study, and arranging the portraits in grids of nine or twelve or fifteen, to bring out the individual variations. They did this for fifty years, never deviating from their austere formula: all the photographs were taken at the same aboveground-level height and under overcast skies (to eliminate shadows), as if they were specimens for a scientific monograph.

  Struth is reserved about the Bechers’ photographs, though he respects what he sees as the ideological backbone of their enterprise. “When Bernd and Hilla made this contract with themselves in the 1950s to catalog these kind of objects, German photography was all abstract subjectivism,” he said
. “People didn’t want to look at reality, because what you saw in Germany in the fifties was destruction and the Holocaust. It was all a terrible reality, so precise looking was not a widespread impulse.” The Bechers’ precise looking was a model of ethical rigor. But Struth believes that “eventually their meaning in the history of art will be linked more with their teaching and the influence it had than with their work.”

  I asked Struth about the influence on him of the Bechers’ pedagogy.

  “Their big pedagogical influence was that they introduced me and others to the history of photography and to its great figures. They were fantastic teachers, and they were fantastic teachers in the way that they demonstrated the complexity of connections. It was an outstanding thing that when you met with Bernd and Hilla, they didn’t talk about photography alone. They talked about movies, journalism, literature—stuff that was very comprehensive and complex. For example, a typical thing Bernd would say was, ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’ ”

  I said, “I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?”

  “It’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust, that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theater.”

  “Did you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”

  “No, no. I didn’t.”

  “Have you read Proust since?”

  “No.”

  “So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”

  Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.

  “It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.

  Struth went on to contrast the beloved, haimish Bechers, whose classes were often held at their house or in a Chinese restaurant, with the “much more difficult to deal with” Gerhard Richter: “Gerhard was very ironic. I never had the feeling that he is someone who speaks naturally or openly. He was friendly, but you never knew what he really meant. It was very coded language and coded behavior.”

  Struth’s characterization of Richter did not surprise me. I had seen the portrait of him and his wife and two children that Struth took for The New York Times Magazine in 2002, on the occasion of a Richter retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is a beautifully composed picture of four people whose bodies are rigid with tension and whose staring faces illustrate different ways of looking hostile. White lilies in a glass vase and a picture of a skull on the wall reinforce the photograph’s primal unease.

  I was surprised to hear that Richter and his wife liked the picture.

  “It’s a very sad and disturbing picture,” I said.

  “Okay,” Struth said.

  “They do not look like a happy family.”

  “Well, that’s not the issue.”

  “That almost is the issue of the picture.”

  Struth conceded that “they don’t look relaxed and happy,” and added, “He’s not an easy person, that’s for sure. He’s a very particular person.”

  As we were leaving the café, Struth said, “I feel bad about Proust and Atget.” Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of the “decisive moments” when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says, “This is going to be a photograph.” I made reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

  During our conversation in the café, Struth received a phone call from the Grieger printing lab telling him that the first test prints of his portrait of the Queen and the Duke were ready for his inspection. Grieger is considered the supreme printing lab for large-scale photography and is the place where many of its practitioners go to have their prints made. At Grieger, we were met by Dagmar Miethke, Struth’s “special person” there, on whose eye and taste he depends for the finish of his photographs. Miethke, an easy and friendly woman of around fifty, pinned the print to the white wall, and the three of us silently regarded it.

  My first impression was of a vaguely familiar elderly couple posing for a formal portrait in a corner of the palatial Minneapolis hotel ballroom where their fiftieth wedding anniversary is being celebrated. The pair were seated on an ornate settee, and my attention was drawn to the woman’s sturdy legs in beige stockings, the right knee uncovered where the skirt of her pale-blue silk dress had hitched up a bit as she settled her ample figure into the settee; and to her feet, in patent leather pumps planted firmly on the fancy hotel carpet. Her white hair was carefully coiffed, in a sort of pompadour in front and fluffy curls on the sides, and her lipsticked mouth was set in an expression of quiet determination. The man—a retired airline pilot?—was smaller, thinner, recessive. They were sitting a little apart, not touching, looking straight ahead. Gradually, the royal couple came into focus as such, and the photograph assumed its own identity as a work by Struth, the plethora of its details somehow tamed to serve a composition of satisfying serenity and readability.

  Struth broke the silence and said that the picture was too yellow, and for the next half hour color adjustments were made on test strips until he was satisfied that the print had reached the degree of coolness he wanted. Then the issue of size arose. The print we were looking at was big, around sixty-three by seventy-nine inches, and he asked that a larger print be made. When this was produced, he regarded the two prints side by side for a long while. It seemed to me that the smaller print was more flattering to the Queen—the larger print made her look larger, almost gross. Struth finally asked that the smaller print be taken away so that he could study the larger print without distraction, and he finally decided on it. Further color adjustments were made on the big print—the Queen’s hands were made less red, the background was darkened, to noticeably good effect—and Struth was satisfied.

  Struth had positioned the settee—upholstered in green silk brocade, with curved gilded arms and legs—at a slant, so that the Queen was more prominent and lit with a kind of white glow, while the Duke receded into the shadows. The Duke is still handsome at ninety, his military bearing intact, but in the double portrait, next to the Queen’s amplitude, he looked a bit shrunken.

  Struth said of the sitting, “When we walked in”—he was accompanied by Hirsch and another assistant, named Carolina Müller—“they were not particularly friendly. No smiles. I was very nervous. I took a few shots and realized I hadn’t adjusted the shutter opening. Then I saw that the pillow behind the Queen was not in a good position—exactly the kind of mistake I didn’t want to make—so I said to her, ‘Excuse me, can you lean forward?’ and I just fixed the pillow behind her back. Then I made three or four more shots. And one of those shots was it. I knew it was it.”

  At his studio, Struth showed me the contact sheets of the sitting. There were the pictures with the badly positioned pillow behind the Queen. In another reject, the Duke had both hands on his thighs, rather than one hand strategically placed—as Struth instructed him to place it—on the seat of the sofa. Another showed the Queen looking majestic, the way she looks on money. In others, her mouth was slightly and awkwardly open, or her hands were folded on her lap in what Struth called a “defensive” position. The selected picture was indeed the right one.

  Struth said he believed that his preparations impressed the royal couple and contributed to the success of the portrait: “They saw we took the task seriously.” He spoke again of the bad photographs of the Queen and the Duke that he had studied, this time in terms of “the mistakes that make them look like almost comic impersonators of their functions rather than like real people. You would be shocked by how many terrible photographs there are of them. It’s clear that the best pictures of Elizabeth and Philip are by Lord Snowdon, because he was a family member. Elizabeth looks happiest in Snowdon’s photographs.” He added, “I think what matters is that when the circumstances are prepared well and the people sit and look into the
camera, there is always a chance of truth.”

  In fact, there is more than a chance. Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie. The most mindless snapshot tells the truth of what the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked. Only the person being photographed can assume the lying appearance of “naturalness” that the portrait photographer seeks and tries to elicit with his repertoire of blandishments. But this appearance is not enough to give the portrait the look of art. For that, the preparations that Struth talked of—the fussing with pillows and the tilting of sofas and, most crucially, the selection of site—are necessary. The portraits of August Sander, who may be the greatest portrait photographer in the history of the medium, are a great object lesson in the significance of settings in the art of the photographic portrait. His settings are not incidental backgrounds for the figures whose souls he seems to have captured with his camera; they are intrinsic to the viewer’s sense that such a capture has taken place. And so it was with Struth’s portrait of Elizabeth and Philip.

  In one of our talks, Struth told me that when he was in high school, he belonged to a little band of classmates—four boys and four girls—who spent all their time together and were determined not to be like their parents, whose recoil from the catastrophe of the war had taken the form of ultra-conventional behavior and a devotion to what was “safe and clean.” Later, as I was leafing through a book of Struth’s photographs, this phrase came floating to mind, for there is a sense in which it describes the world of Struth’s huge, handsome pictures, from which the dangerous and dirty is conspicuously absent. Dallas Parking Lot (2001), for example, a magnificent composition of cool grays and icy blues and warm browns that Struth extracted from the ugly mess of the construction boom in Dallas, shows a rooftop parking lot in early-morning near emptiness and after-rain freshness, over which pristine glass high-rise buildings hover like benign guardians of the sleeping city’s security. As it happened, this picture was not included in a retrospective of Struth’s work in Düsseldorf (these days, there seems to be a Struth exhibition opening somewhere at every moment), to which he accompanied me on my last day in Germany, but in which many other representations of Struth’s safe and clean world were on view.