Thomas Struth. Museum Photographs.

People before paintings

Thomas Struth is a German photographer. Museum Photographs is a series of large colour pictures he made inside major museums in Europe and the United States. The idea came from his years living in Naples and Rome, where old art does not sit apart but mixes with daily life.

The most concentrated period of work was 1989 and 1990. Struth went into the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Vatican Museums and the Pantheon in Rome. In 1992 he returned for the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In each picture the famous paintings still hang on the wall. But the camera does not aim at them alone. It steps back, far enough to take in the people looking: a tour group, someone on a bench, a few passing through, one person who stays a long time.

The size of a painting

These photographs are large. Louvre 1, taken in 1989, is about 180 cm high and nearly 230 cm wide. National Gallery 1 from the same year is almost 176 cm high. Pantheon in Rome, 1990, is more than 233 cm wide. That is the scale of a painting in a museum, not of a picture in a book.

The size creates a loop. When Museum Photographs hang in a gallery, visitors stand before them exactly as the people in them stand before paintings. They stop, lean in, step back to take in the whole. The people outside and the people inside seem to mirror each other.

In 1990 the series was shown in turn at five galleries in Cologne, New York, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, and appeared in the Aperto section of that year's Venice Biennale. A series about museums travelled around the places people go to see art.

Looking at looking

Every old painting in a museum was once an object in ordinary life: hung in a church, a palace, someone's drawing room. The museum takes it out of that life and sets it before strangers. Struth photographs this very encounter, between a very old object and the people visiting it today.

In the pictures, visitors wear the clothes of 1989 and 1990. They carry bags, hold guidebooks, bring children. These ordinary details stand beside paintings centuries old. Two times are laid over each other in one frame.

Many of the visitors turn their backs to the lens, or look away. We cannot see what they think. We see only posture: hands clasped behind, head tilted back, a hand pointing at the canvas. The body speaks for the face. And because the faces are hidden, it is easy to put ourselves in their place. Each of those backs could be ours, some afternoon, in a room like that.

What Struth makes clear is that looking at art is not neutral. Where people stand, how long, with whom, all of it is part of understanding a painting. The act of looking, normally invisible, becomes something with shape and posture, something that can be photographed.

In the same period other photographers turned their cameras on museums, such as Candida Höfer with her rooms empty of people. Struth did the opposite. He kept the people, because for him a museum is only complete when someone stands there looking.