Read Online Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm - Free Book Online

exactly when—“I feel as if I always knew about it”—and was tormented by the question of his parents’ complicity. His father liked to tell stories about his bad war. He had fought in France and then in Russia, where he was severely wounded twice, and survived “almost as if by a miracle.” These stories “irritated” the young Thomas. “Whenever my father talked about the war, he told only his personal story. He never said something like ‘Oh, my God, when I came out of it and realized what we had done, I felt so sorry!’ That would have been the natural thing to say. But he never said it. I don’t know what he believed.” Struth went on to speak, in a somewhat amorphous way, of his work as a form of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) by which Germany’s best spirits remain gripped. Will his portrait of the monarch who was on the right side of history (“the last living connection to an episode—the island race standing up to Hitler—that has become the foundation story, almost the creation myth, of modern Britain,” as Jonathan Freedland recently characterized Elizabeth II in The New York Review of Books ) bring his project of expiation to a remarkable kind of culmination?
    If so, it will not be visible in the portrait itself. Struth’s work does not reflect the culture of guilt he speaks of. Unlike, for example, the gritty, dread-inducing paintings of Anselm Kiefer, whose thoughts never seem far from Auschwitz, Struth’s photographs evoke nothing bad. They have a lightness of spirit, you could almost say a sunniness, that is not present in the work of the other major practitioners of the new oversize color photography—Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff among them. Struth is the Sunday child of the lot. His huge photographs—city streets, people looking at paintings in museums, industrial landscapes, factories, laboratories, rain forests, and family groups—are as pleasing as his persona; they seem to be an extension of it. Michael Fried, in his tautly argued book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), pauses to remark, with apparent (uncharacteristic) irrelevance—but evident intuitive understanding of the force of Struth’s radiance—“A striking fact about Struth’s public career is the almost universally enthusiastic response that his work has received.” An early enthusiast, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote in the Swiss art journal Parkett in 1997, “It is time to say that Struth’s pictures regularly take my breath away. I find it hard to look at them steadily for any length of time, so intense is their effect on my emotions.” In the catalog of a 2003 Struth retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund testified to “a remarkable feeling” they experienced while looking at Struth’s photograph of two women standing before Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris, Street; Rainy Day , “of stepping into one’s own skin again, while alienation from others and from history—the curse of the modern—is dissolved in the image.” Today there is no diminution of the enthusiasm; if anything, it is growing, and sane critics are continuing to lose it under Struth’s mesmerizing spell.
    The morning after the lunch in Berlin, Struth and I drove to a factory outside Dresden, operated by a company called Solar-World, where he would spend the day photographing. He had been there a few weeks earlier to ascertain whether he would find a subject, and he did. We were greeted by an agreeable young woman named Susanne Herrmann, the plant’s public relations manager, who took us to a changing room where we put on white jumpsuits, white plastic hairnets, and white booties over our shoes so that we would bring no contaminating dust particles into the plant.