Museum Photographs

In the late 1980s, Thomas Struth began his Museum Photographs, which allowed him to combine his former passion for painting with photography. Past and present meet in these images, which explore the relationship between historical works of art and their viewers. In 1999, a decade after his first Museum Photographs, Struth revisited the series. This time, the images expand the original theme of the series into other photographic approaches and perspectives. Struth includes himself as an observer in one picture, while in another he focuses exclusively on the artwork and the empty space around it, and in yet another he shows how a single work in a cinematographically constructed display case is presented as an unfamiliar cultural-historical object.