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拍品專文
Looming over the ant-like figures of the people, Milan Cathedral appears as an edifice packed with authority. Compared to the mild chaos of the haphazard placing of the people standing and sitting in front of the building, its symmetry, wealth of detail and decorative cohesion speak of order, of reason, and these are emphasised by its monumental scale. Thomas Struth's Mailänder Dom (Fassade), executed in 1998, is a crisp image of the cathedral that itself conveys some sense of the building's overwhelming dimensions through its own size. The sharp focus of the cathedral recalls the photographs of Struth's teacher, Bernd Becher. However, Struth's image, while appearing to share the concerns with objectivity of Bernd and Hilla Becher, aims at capturing something more subjective, more profound and more characteristic about the world in which we live.
In many ways, Mailänder Dom (Fassade) is an active continuation of the photographs that Struth had taken of gritty urban landscapes, showing how human lives are affected and even controlled by their environment. Here, Milan Cathedral is revealed as a centre of human interaction, as it has been for centuries. Indeed, the city has in part grown around this building.
Mailänder Dom (Fassade) also shares some of the concerns of Struth's museum pictures, exploring the roles of culture and tourism in the modern world. This building was created for religious reasons, and yet the colourful garb of the tourists shown outside it forces the viewer to consider its relative obsolescence in our more secular age. They are surely not worshippers for the large part. The religious buildings and artefacts of yore have become the tourist sites of today. Struth is not merely documenting the appearance of places, is not merely reducing the fabric of our urban life to abstraction as is the case in so many other 'objective' photographs, although these factors are important to Mailänder Dom (Fassade) and its aesthetic. Instead, he is attempting to grasp and to convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world. 'For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections,' he has said. 'At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process' (Struth, quoted in A. Goldstein, 'Portraits of Self-Reflection', pp. 166-73, C. Wylie et al., Thomas Struth 1977 2002, exh.cat., Dallas, 2002, p. 171). In addition, reflecting some of the thoughts of another of his teachers, Gerhard Richter, Struth plays with ideas relating to the nature and purpose of photography and also, by showing a picture of a cultural icon, he explores notions of our understanding and appreciation of culture itself.
In many ways, Mailänder Dom (Fassade) is an active continuation of the photographs that Struth had taken of gritty urban landscapes, showing how human lives are affected and even controlled by their environment. Here, Milan Cathedral is revealed as a centre of human interaction, as it has been for centuries. Indeed, the city has in part grown around this building.
Mailänder Dom (Fassade) also shares some of the concerns of Struth's museum pictures, exploring the roles of culture and tourism in the modern world. This building was created for religious reasons, and yet the colourful garb of the tourists shown outside it forces the viewer to consider its relative obsolescence in our more secular age. They are surely not worshippers for the large part. The religious buildings and artefacts of yore have become the tourist sites of today. Struth is not merely documenting the appearance of places, is not merely reducing the fabric of our urban life to abstraction as is the case in so many other 'objective' photographs, although these factors are important to Mailänder Dom (Fassade) and its aesthetic. Instead, he is attempting to grasp and to convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world. 'For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections,' he has said. 'At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process' (Struth, quoted in A. Goldstein, 'Portraits of Self-Reflection', pp. 166-73, C. Wylie et al., Thomas Struth 1977 2002, exh.cat., Dallas, 2002, p. 171). In addition, reflecting some of the thoughts of another of his teachers, Gerhard Richter, Struth plays with ideas relating to the nature and purpose of photography and also, by showing a picture of a cultural icon, he explores notions of our understanding and appreciation of culture itself.