Nature & Politics

Nature & Politics is Thomas Struth's most recent comprehensive monograph, published by MACK in 2016 to accompany a touring museum exhibition. The catalogue reproduces 65 works, including all 30 shown in the exhibition, covering the years since his 1978-2010 retrospective.

Struth built his reputation on strictly separated subject fields: architecture, portraiture, landscape, and museum interiors. Nature & Politics adds a fifth: sites of technological and scientific research, among them physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space facilities, dockyards, nuclear plants and operating theatres. Alongside those pictures, the book includes two other projects from the same years: photographs made at Disneyland, and a series shot in Israel and Palestine that mixes portraiture, landscape and technology within a single, unresolved political territory.

Struth trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Bernd Becher and was the first artist in residence at P.S.1 in the early 1980s. He later became the first Professor of Photography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Nature & Politics extends the deadpan, large-format documentary method of his earlier Museum Photographs into the machinery and contested ground behind contemporary life, rather than the public rooms in front of it.