1. Thomas Struth was born on 11 October 1954 and is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs series, black and white photographs of the streets of Dusseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s, and his family photographs series.
In 1976, as part of a student exhibition at the Academy, Thomas Struth first showed a grid composed of 49 photographs taken from a centralized perspective on Dusseldorf's deserted streets, each of them obeying a strict logic of central symmetry.
Strong contrasts of light and shade are avoided, Thomas Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning.
Thomas Struth went on to produce similar series in Rome, Edinburgh, Tokyo, and elsewhere.
In 1989, Thomas Struth began work on his best-known cycle, Museum Photographs, devoted to the visitors to some of the world's great museums and buildings, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, the Accademia in Venice, and the Pantheon in Rome.
From 1998 on, Thomas Struth expanded the series with images shot on sites of powerful secular significance.
Between 1998 and 2006, Thomas Struth began scouring the earth for jungle settings in Japan, Australia, China, America and Europe; his first eight large-format Pictures from Paradise were created in 1998 in the Daintree Rainforest in Australia.
In 2014, Thomas Struth presented a series of pictures in which he again penetrates key places of human imagination to scrutinize the landscape of enterprise, invention and digital engineering.
Meanwhile, Thomas Struth continues to add to his collection of family portraits.
In 2002, Gerhard Richter asked Thomas Struth to make a family portrait for an article on Richter's work in the New York Times Magazine.
From 1993 to 1996, Thomas Struth was the first Professor of Photography at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Thomas Struth's work has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions, among them the 44th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX at Kassel.
In 1988, Thomas Struth exhibited in the group show "Another Objectivity", organized by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, which sought to define a current of research born in Germany in the wake of the Bechers' work.
Thomas Struth later had his first solo exhibition in the US at The Renaissance Society in Chicago in 1990.
In 2007, Thomas Struth married author Tara Bray Smith in New York.
Thomas Struth's work is held, among others, in the following public collections:.