Year: 1993
Medium: chromogenic print, face-mounted to Diasec, framed
Dimensions: image size: 80.6 by 58.7 cm (31 3/4 x 23 1/8 in.) frame size: 114.6 by 92.1 cm (45 1/8 x 36 1/4 in.)
Edition: No. 5 of 10
Acquired from Sotheby’s, 2024
A portrait of Gerhard Richter, taken by Thomas Struth. Both are renowned artists trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and they also had a mentor-student relationship. Struth initially majored in painting when he enrolled at the academy, with Richter as his instructor. And it was none other than Richter who then encouraged Struth to transfer to the newly established photography department, run by figures such as Bernd Becher. This work is one of Struth’s “Portraits,” for which the photographer is well known, alongside his “Unconscious Places,” “Museum Photographs,” and “New Pictures from Paradise” series. Struth has also produced several other works featuring Richter as a subject. While the other pieces also include Richter’s family and surroundings, this photograph preserves only a direct gaze focused on the person of Richter himself. The work thus suggests how Struth, in particular, even among other photographers of the Becher school, truly inherited the characteristic “typological” approach. On the other hand, the indirect influence that Richter’s incorporation of photographic techniques into painting had on Struth’s photography was surely no less significant than the more direct influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and his respect seems to permeate this work. Struth’s “Portraits” are shot with long exposures, sometimes of up to eight seconds. He also invests a great deal of time in preliminary dialogue with his subjects, whether an individual or family, to discuss how they should be photographed, only then turning to production. A photograph does not exist outside of time, and this portrait captures the period of a few seconds in which Struth and Richter, on either side of the lens, regarded each other. One could even go so far as to say that it embodies the relationship that the pair had shared from long before that moment.
