Two Interpretations of Thomas Struth's "Crosby Street, New York, Soho"

Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho (1978)

Robert B. Pippin, in his Philosophy by Other Means (2021), approaches art as a form of thought. He calls his approach “philosophical criticism.” He says the task of philosophical criticism is to illuminate the “philosophical issue” at the heart of the artwork. In theory, this is an interesting approach. Surely, there’s a thinking process involved in the creation of art. One of criticism’s tasks is to track it. But in Pippin’s hands, the approach doesn’t clarify; it occludes. 

The problem is that his own thinking is blinkered by an odd notion. He thinks that the “defeat of theatricality” is “central to establishing the work, any pictorial work in modernity, as an artwork.” I say “odd” because the question of whether a work is theatrical or anti-theatrical seems such a minor consideration. Much more important, in my view, is the work’s style – the way it makes thought visible. 

Take Thomas Struth’s brilliant “Crosby Street, New York, Soho” (1978), for example. Pippin uses it to illustrate his point about how a sense of meaningfulness in art is “opened by the still, mute, eerie absences in the objects depicted.” Fair enough. But bear in mind that “absences in the objects” (italicized by Pippin for emphasis) is, in Pippin’s view, a loaded phrase. It’s one of the indices of anti-theatricality.  

I like Struth’s photo. Why? It has nothing to do with anti-theatricality – at least I don’t think it does. It has to do with pattern, texture, all those subtle shades of grimy gray, and the white light of early morning glinting in the chrome and glass of that parked car. It’s a beautiful picture! But for Struth’s inspiration, it would’ve passed unnoticed. 

In his book, Pippin says that value resides in whether an artwork can be said to reveal “a kind of truth.” Okay. But, for me, value also resides in enjoying the aesthetic aspects of the work.

Reflections on the "Proust-Atget Moment" in Janet Malcolm's "Depth of Field"

Photo by Thomas Struth

If I had to pick one favorite from the cornucopia of great New Yorker pieces I’ve read since starting this blog in 2010, I might choose Janet Malcolm’s arresting “Depth of Field” (September 26, 2011), a profile of the photographer Thomas Struth. For me, it’s an instance of double bliss – I love Malcolm’s writing style and I relish her photography criticism. But there’s one aspect of “Depth of Field” that’s always bugged me. It arises from the following passage:

I asked Struth about the influence on him of the Bechers’ pedagogy.

“Their big pedagogical influence was that they introduced me and others to the history of photography and to its great figures. They were fantastic teachers, and they were fantastic teachers in the way that they demonstrated the complexity of connections. It was an outstanding thing that when you met with Bernd and Hilla they didn’t talk about photography alone. They talked about movies, journalism, literature—stuff that was very comprehensive and complex. For example, a typical thing Bernd would say was ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’ ”

I said, “I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?”

“It’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theatre.”

“Did you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”

“No, no. I didn’t.”

“Have you read Proust since?”

“No.”

“So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”

Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.

“It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.

A few paragraphs later, Malcolm writes,

As we were leaving the café, Struth said, “I feel bad about Proust and Atget.” Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of the “decisive moments” when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says, “This is going to be a photograph.” I made reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

Yes, but perhaps it’s a bit too opportunistic. The connection between Atget and Proust may be questionable, but it isn’t implausible. Anthony Lane, in his review of Atget Paris (“A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 15, 1994), mentions a book titled A Vision of Paris that couples scenes by Atget with extracts by Proust. Lane writes,

It was not the happy marriage you might expect; for one thing, it reminded you just how deeply À la Recherche breathed the air of the beau monde, whereas Atget was a man of the monde, pure and simple. But something else about the book was off key: the attempt to dress Atget up as an expert in nostalgia and, by printing the images in sepia, turn him into a kind of minor-league Proust who longed to clutch at the past. You can see the temptation: no one can look at his shots of the Tuileries, or the Arcadian vistas that he found at Versailles, without a sympathetic pang.

That Malcolm hadn’t read Lane’s New Yorker review and that she didn’t know about the existence of A Vision of Paris is, given her deep interest in the aesthetics of photography, inconceivable. So when she says to Struth, “I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?,” what she’s really doing is giving Struth a hard time. She knows about the Atget-Proust connection. She may not agree with it, but she knows about it. At least, I suspect she does. If I’m right, it follows that she knows Struth’s reference to Becher's observation (“You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust”) isn’t as ridiculous as she makes it out to be.

Credit: The above photograph, Thomas Struth’s "String Handling, SolarWorld, Freiberg 2011,” is from Janet Malcolm’s “Depth of Field” (The New Yorker, September 26, 2011)

September 26, 2011 Issue

Janet Malcolm’s "Depth of Field," in this week’s issue of the magazine, is unlike any “Annals of Art” piece I’ve ever read. Most “Annals of Art” stories are exercises in appreciation. The artists aren’t grilled; the writers aren’t angry (if they are, they don’t say so). But in “Depth of Field,” Malcolm pounces on something her subject, the photographer Thomas Struth, says in casual conversation over lunch, sharply questions him, and turns it into an object lesson in “journalistic opportunism.” She also admits to “rather crossly” leaving Struth at a photo-shoot that seemed to her to drag on too long. And she mocks Struth’s recent portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, taken at Windsor Castle, saying, “My first impression was of a vaguely familiar elderly couple posing for formal portrait in a corner of the palatial Minneapolis hotel ballroom where there fiftieth wedding anniversary is being celebrated.” All of these moves, it seems to me, are against Malcolm’s interest to report. They put her in an unfavorable light, making her appear petty, crotchety, and negative. Yet, to her credit, she doesn’t repress them; she includes them. It’s her psychology coming out, and she lets it come out. As a result, her piece seems truer than most other art writings - the prose equivalent of a very precise photo shot through the filter of her own fine-tuned, deconstructionist sensibility. I found it riveting, especially the way she swings around to the opposite point of view, admitting she was wrong to be cross at Struth, showing Struth to be good natured, even finding the portrait of Elizabeth and Philip to be not so bad after all. She says, “Gradually the royal couple came into focus as such, and the photograph assumed its own identity as a work by Struth, the plethora of its details somehow tamed to serve a composition of satisfying serenity and readability.” The same could be said about “Depth of Field.” At first, after I’d finished reading it, I didn’t know what to make of it. I found it both irritating and elating. But gradually, like Struth’s picture of the royal couple, it came into focus and assumed its own identity as a work by Malcolm, an artful journalistic portrait of an artful photographic portraitist.

Credit: The above photograph is Thomas Struth's portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh; it appears in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Janet Malcolm's "Depth of Field."