Thomas Struth (b. 1954)
Shanxi Nan Lu, Shanghaisigned, titled, numbered and dated 'Shanxi Nan Lu Shanghai 1999 31/32 +8 Thomas Struth Print: 2000' (on the reverse)
C-print
image: 11¼ x 14¼in. (28.5 x 36.1cm.)
sheet: 11⅞ x 15½in. (30.2 x 39.3cm.)
Conceived in 1999 and printed in 2000, this work is number thirty-one from an edition of thirty-two plus eight artist's proofs
Provenance:Renate Kammer Galerie, Hamburg.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003.
Exhibited:Brussels, Fondazione Rolla,
Urban, 2013-2014 (another from the edition exhibited).
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Specialist Notes:Shanxi Nan Lu, Shanghai is part of Thomas Struth’s ongoing investigation in street photography, begun in the 1970s. Struth visited China four times between 1995 and 2002, travelling extensively throughout the country to Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, as well as to famous landscapes such as the Yangtze River, the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia, capturing factories, farms and pilgrimage sites along the way. The photographs Struth took in China depict the diversity of the country’s historic landscapes and busy city streets.
The frenetic experience of the urban environment in China stimulated a significant change in Struth’s approach to taking pictures of city streets. Many of the street photographs made in the major cities capture crowds of people, cars and bicycles in addition to the chaotic urban environment. ‘The idea I initially generated was to make pictures of extremely dense information, so that you could not in fact read every detail in them’, Struth explains, ‘When you look at one of the street pictures, you can spend time analyzing them productively. But what I wanted to do was to make pictures that you couldn’t completely read in that way’ (T. Struth, quoted in G. Blank, ‘The Tower and the View: Gil Blank and Thomas Struth in Conversation’, in
Whitewall, no. 6, Summer 2007).