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From June 28 - September 28, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago held a mid-career retrospective of the
work of Thomas Struth. Struth is mainly known for his immense photographs of the world's cultural centers but one look at
his life's work shows him working in various genres including portraiture, architectural photography, and landscape. Objectivity
is often associated with Struth's work and it is exactly this impartial attention to detail in the work that unifies this
diverse portfolio. In 1954, Thomas Struth was bon in Gelden, Germany and from 1973 to 1980 he studied at the Kunstakademie
in Dusseldorf, which is notable today for producing a virtual cornucopia of distinguished alumni including Andreas Gursky
and Thomas Ruff. Struth's involvement at this school helped place him as one of the central figures in a wave of German photography
that emerged out of the Seventies. The success of the Kunstakademie and Struth, himself, is in part due to his mentors at
the school - Gerhard Richter, Peter Kleeman, and the couple Bernd and Hilla Bercher. In 1993, Struth joined the faculty at
the Staatliche Hochschule fur Gestaltung and today he continues to reside in Dusseldorf. His artwork is internationally renown
and in 1997 he was awarded the Spectrum International Photography Prize of Lower Saxony. His work has been exhibited in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirschorn Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,
the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
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