Thomas Struth: Revealing images from a master of photography | CNN

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Between 2009 and 2014, acclaimed German photographer Thomas Struth made eight trips to Israel and the West Bank. He took about 2,000 snapshots with a digital camera of scenes he found interesting, then around 60 photographs in large format.

Out of those, he selected just 18, his ultimate summary of a five-year project that is now on show for the first time in its entirety at the Aspen Art Museum.

“Photography is very much about editing and reducing to the number of works that is really necessary,” he said in a phone interview. Struth is best known for his museum photographs – in which the focus is on the spectators – his black and white street photography and his distinctive family portraits. In 2011 he took the diamond jubilee photograph of the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh for the National Portrait Gallery.

His latest shots, he argues, contain some of the sadness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but are free from a direct political message. “I think I come from a position of empathy for both sides, and also a critical tone that is not particularly evident as I’m not a journalist. I don’t believe in putting the fingers in the wound too obviously; it makes things too easy for whoever is viewing my work.”

Acclaimed German photographer Thomas Struth offers his personal view of Israel and the Palestinian territories in 18 essential photographs taken over eight trips between 2009 and 2014. This one is from the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem, depicting a Palestinian woman. "This picture is about the fact that what's happening there is embedded in every individual, such as this woman, highlighting the relationship between the individual and the community," he said.

The controversial Israeli settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem, considered occupied territory by most of the world: "I photographed this settlement several times, trying to get a picture, but I ended up taking one extra trip specifically to look at it again. When I arrived I realized works to enlarge the settlement had started, so I found this point of view which makes it look like a tongue, reaching further into the land."

"This is the Palestinian city of Hebron, it is heavily protected, the view here is into the settlement from the Israeli side, offering evidence of what's happening here."

The exhibition includes two family portraits. This is the Faez family, photographed in Rehovot, Israel. "The Faez family was introduced to me in 2009 by Frederic Brenner, the French photographer who initiated the project. Frederic and I had lunch with them, I made the picture outside the entrance of the family's house."

This church was built directly over the site where the Catholic tradition places the house of Mary, and the Annunciation from the archangel Gabriel that she would conceive Jesus. It is the largest Christian sanctuary in the region: "There are layers of religious obsession here in a way, as everything is covered in layers of different designs and different overbearing architectural styles, especially the latest construction of the concrete ceiling that looks almost like a Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott science fiction film, it's so absurd."

A fortification of the 1967 wall, the landscape seen in the background is Syria, as this is close to the border. "This is a military fortification but it's already 40 years old, it doesn't contain any actual drama of the moment, the metal parts are rusty. It's over, it's in the past; what remains is a reflection of time that has passed since then."

"This s a private yard with a banana tree and an Israeli flag, so this was for me an expression of the early time of settlements. It's also strange that it's in the middle of Tel Aviv, I felt just attracted to it."

"A former mosque on the Golan Heights, showing destruction from the 1967 conflict. It's a melancholic scene, with direct evidence of war."

No expectations

Struth went to the region as one of the participants in a larger project titled “This Place,” started by photographer Frédéric Brenner, notable for a quarter century of work on the Jewish diaspora. But it took some convincing. “Brenner came to my studio on his 50th birthday, which I found unusual. We got along very well and I decided to participate,” said Struth.

After an initial stay of a few weeks, Struth went back seven more times, spending up to three weeks per trip and exploring, among others, East Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the Golan Heights, Ramallah, Al-Khalil/Hebron, Nazareth, and Negev. The last trip was done exclusively to re-take a specific photo of the Israeli settlement of Har Homa, as he was unhappy with what he already had.

Struth took one final trip specifically to take this photograph of the Har Homa settlement.

Struth had not visited Israel before the project, although his parents had, and his brother had worked in a kibbutz, a type of Israeli communal settlement based on agriculture. “I didn’t have any expectation other than looking forward to finally getting there after having witnessed the conflict between Israel and Palestine for all my life in the news, but I was fairly open otherwise,” he said.

“But I was a bit nervous, because I was wondering what I would be doing, what my choices would be. I had never worked before in a place of conflict.”

Two families

The exhibition includes two family portraits, one depicting eight Bedouin men in Negev, the other a young family of nine in Rehovot. The presence of these two photographs, literally full of people, is in stark contrast with the rest of the images, where people are barely seen at all. It’s an element of divergence that stems from the more general change in approach that Struth has applied to this show.

“In my body of work I usually have one artistic concept that I apply to many different locations, but here I did the opposite, I applied several concepts I’ve done before on one location. There’s family portraits, there’s science and technology, there’s architectural photographs, some landscape photography. This is something I’ve never done before,” he said.

The works, which encompass street view, technological research, landscapes, holy sites and private yards, are designed to be scrutinized, according to curator and Aspen Art Museum Director, Heidi Zuckerman. “For me, art has always been about an opportunity to pay attention. The precision and clarity of Thomas Struth’s photographs encourage close looking. His images of Israel and Palestine offer a different view of places and people that perhaps we thought we knew. Yet they also reveal how much more complex these things truly are,” she said in an email interview.

“With the self-reflection that art allows, we can often understand ourselves, and what we value, differently.”

Thomas Struth is on show at the Aspen Art Museum through June 10, 2018.