Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth was born at Geldern in Germany in 1954 and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, first painting under Gerhard Richter and then photography in Bernd Becher's first class. The early Unconscious Places were black-and-white street views, taken from the middle of the road with a large-format camera, of cities with nobody in them. From the mid-1980s he made formally posed family portraits, and from 1989 the Museum Photographs, in which visitors stand before paintings in the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Accademia in Venice and become part of the picture. Later series photographed dense jungle and forest, crowds looking at Michelangelo's David, and the machinery of laboratories, shipyards and space programmes. In 2011 he photographed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at Windsor.

The large colour prints are chromogenic, made in small editions and very often face-mounted to acrylic and framed to his specification, and that mounting is part of the work: it cannot be reversed, it scratches, and it does not tolerate heat or strong light. Several images exist in more than one size as separate editions, so title, dimensions and edition number identify the work. The black-and-white street photographs are gelatin silver prints, generally smaller, and a separate category. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on a label on the reverse, and the studio and his galleries hold the edition records.