Thomas Struth

The Art Restorers, San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples is a seminal work that inspired the artist’s celebrated series of ‘Museum Photographs’ which he began the following year. Combining Struth’s three primary interests as a photographer – that of locations identifying specific places, portraiture, and photographing human interaction with art - in it he approaches a vast Naples restoration workshop from an acute angle, creating an effect that avoids the rigorousness of a frontal portrait and that leads the viewer’s gaze into the depths of the composition. It sees a direct comparison between painting and photography in which the relationships of the bodies, the pictures and the space are as poetic as any previously in the history of art.

Each standing in relaxed poses, the four young art restorers and the paintings on which they work become enveloped by the yawning emptiness of the space they inhabit. The light, which enters the room at an angle, removes any trace of artificiality and clarifies the relationships between the disparate elements. The restorers have arranged themselves together as a unit while maintaining their independence from one another and seem to welcome this interruption of the monotony of their work. The paintings stacked against the right wall stretch back in an endless row and seem to have lost their meaning. Old and new, they are condemned to an illusory existence of uncertain length. They are not on display and as a result we are not prompted to approach them consciously or systematically. Their obsoleteness is reinforced by the positioning of the camera which only touches upon them tangentially whilst drawing the living figures towards the viewer. There are two distinct colour systems at play here; one in front of the pictures and one within them. Although included by the artist in his portrait series, it is a dramatic effect that Struth employed later in his ‘Museum Photographs’ and is already fully developed here.