Detail

For eighteen years German artist Thomas Struth has been taking pictures of visitors to museums. The photographs of his “Audience”-series were taken in 2004 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Galleria dell’ Academia, Florence, that was organized to celebrate the fifth centenary of Michelangelo’s David statue. In contrast to his earlier museum photographs in this series Struth concentrates only on the visitors. The larger-than-life statue itself shows up in none of the pictures. Yet its aura is somehow reflected in the visitors’ sculptural postures and their upturned gazes. Struth’s idiosyncratic perspective makes visible the various aesthetic and social aspects that determine how art is approached and perceived: the relationship, for instance, between institutional space, art and a public whose reaction ranges from the package tourist’s boredom to a quasi-religious devotion; or the physical presence of the visitors and their relations with one another. Struth’s pictures are neither staged nor digitally modified. For this series, he showed up daily at the gallery, taking pictures for several hours over a time-span of almost two weeks. From the countless photographs made he then selected ten.