Not to be confused with his near-contemporary Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth is one of that small band of artists – Francis Bacon and Canaletto are others – whose work seems to be an emanation of their names. A generalised expression of astonishment, "'Struth!" started out as an oath: "God's truth!" Certainly, there is an impersonal, almost omniscient quality to the truth conveyed by Struth's best photographs, among them a series devoted to "Places of Worship" in which the camera exults in its ability to capture what he calls "monumental emotional packages of overwhelming experience." This raises an obvious question: do these epic photographs deliver that which they capture? What is the nature of the aesthetic relationship – to frame the question more tightly – between a partial self-portrait of the photographer (identified only by the anonymous blur of his blue jacket) and the Christ-like self-portrait of Dürer he is contemplating in that modern, secular place of worship, the art gallery?  These questions, it needs emphasising, are ones posed not by a doubting critic but by Struth himself. The photograph – "the undeniable truth of what is in front of you" – is for him the product of "an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process." The photographs, in these terms, are relics of the wholly cerebral process by which they came into existence. And yet some of them seem as mysterious as miracles.  Struth himself came into existence in the routine way, in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He began studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973, first with Gerhard Richter and then – at Richter's suggestion – with the newly appointed professor of photography, Bernd Becher. If Richter was interested in photography primarily as a goad to painting, Becher and his wife Hilla were devoted, with a glacial fixity of purpose, to the art of photography in its documentary essence – a commitment that could be traced back to August Sander and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the Weimar republic. Partly through the Bechers' own work – rigidly objective surveys of architectural forms – and later through the spreading reputations of their protégés (Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Struth and Ruff) the Düsseldorf school became a kind of "international style" in the realm of photography. Its rise coincided with and was marked by a double inflation: in the scale of the works produced and the prices they fetched.  Modest in size, black-and-white, the works of Struth's early maturity – made in the late 1970s – display many of the features that will define the later, bigger and better-known colour works. The passage of time may also reveal them to be among his very best works, or at least the work in which his best qualities are found in most concentrated form. This is appropriate for these views of deserted streets – first in Düsseldorf, then New York, later in Rome, Edinburgh and beyond – came to be preoccupied by the attempt to document locations where the meaning of a given city was most "condensed or compacted". The tram lines and overhead cables stretching down the receding and empty streets emphasised Struth's preference for central perspective (which, as John Berger had explained earlier in the decade, causes the visible world to converge on the eye of the spectator "as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God").  Less grandly, there were echoes (especially in the picture of Campo Dei Fiori in Rome) of the Parisian street views of Atget who, under the expressed intention of providing "documents for artists", established a highly personalised style of detached inventory. Working in America in the 1930s, Walker Evans shared Atget's fondness for using the receding vista as a way of suggesting the view through "a stack of decades"; in Struth's case the views are often blocked by buildings of more recent or older provenance. And even when we are permitted to gaze, unimpeded, towards some kind of vanishing point, the scenes evoke not a vista of years but, as it were, a present of unusually extended duration. As a consequence there is no narrative potential in these pictures.  It's not just that the streets are deserted (ie that everyone's indoors, tucked up in bed); the buildings look uninhabited too. There is no sense – in spite of all the windows – that there might be someone looking out, that our gaze is in any way reciprocated. In mood these photographs are reminiscent of the opening scenes of Night Work by the Austrian novelist Thomas Glavinic in which a man in Vienna, Jonas, wakes up to discover that he is the last person on earth:  He kept an eye open for signs of life, or at least for some indication of what might have happened here, but all he saw were abandoned cars neatly parked . . . He looked in all directions. Stood still and listened. Walked the few metres back to the intersection and peered down the adjoining streets. Parked cars, nothing else . . . He noticed nothing out of the ordinary.  Jonas's wanderings – his investigation of this strange extinction of narrative – force him to conclude that "some catastrophe was to blame". The nature of that catastrophe is not made clear but in some of Struth's pictures there is the pervasive if never explicit suggestion of the Third Reich and the second world war. For someone of Struth's generation, as he has said, this confrontation "with Germany's past" was unavoidable. Whether photographing streets or making the "Family Portraits" (another important series), "the question of what your family did under fascism was never far away . . . The traces of structures, social and psychological, are legible." The empty cityscapes seem devoid of memory – while all the time suggesting that this lack might itself be a memory. (This sense has deepened over the years as the photographs have become subtly ingrained with our memories: of other times when we have seen them, in books and earlier exhibitions.) Inverting the claim of Dresden-born Durs Grünbein that "Memory has no real estate" (in his poem "Europe After the Rains"), Struth asks if this is what the world would look like if memory were purely physical, tangible, if it resided not in people's heads but only in structures, in the buildings and streets they had created.  The legacy of nazism is specific to the German pictures but versions of his mission question – "Why do cities look the way they do?" – are asked in New York and elsewhere. Needless to say, they are never answered – that would provide a narrative. Instead there is the conviction that the photographer, in the words of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "had a Geiger counter for meaning, whose meter happened to go crazy at this location".  We are touching here on what Walter Benjamin called "the optical unconscious" (not the collective unconscious as the authors of an essay in the catalogue accompanying the upcoming Whitechapel show mistakenly claim). Another of Benjamin's ideas informs – and is tested by – the many photographs Struth made of people looking at paintings in museums (and, in a few instances, of the way these people might appear to the paintings they are looking at). The reciprocal choreography whereby viewers accidentally echo poses depicted in the paintings was a rich source of visual quips for the Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, but for Struth this was just the starting point. What interested him was the chance to bring together "the time of the picture and the time of the viewer". And not only that. In Benjamin's famous formulation the aura of the work of art was lost by frequent reproduction (as the aura of his idea has itself been bleached out by incessant re-quotation). With this in mind Benjamin's account can usefully be balanced by another famous passage, from Don DeLillo's White Noise, where the narrator, Jack, and his friend Murray visit the "Most Photographed Barn in America". "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one," Murray explains. "Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."  What kind of accumulation and convergence occurs when we come face to face with the most frequently reproduced items in a museum? This is the question Struth asks of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa – and of the people who make the daily pilgrimage to see it. The most spectacular work in the series is probably the super-size photograph of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, taken while it was on loan to the National Museum of Art in Tokyo. The painting is hung behind bullet-proof glass, making it look like a cinema screen on which an epic costume drama is being projected, watched by an audience of silhouetted Japanese who, exactly as prescribed by DeLillo, are "part of the aura".  Taking advantage of the new-found ability to make photographs on the scale of history paintings, Struth made visible the compound phenomenon that might be termed the aura of nameless energies. The project reached a logical apotheosis in 2007 when photographs from the series were exhibited in the Prado, some in proximity to the paintings depicted in them, like magnets with their silent powers of mutual attraction and negation simultaneously heightened and held in check. At the Whitechapel someone, surely, will photograph people gazing at these famous photographs of people gazing at the famous paintings.  Along with the various overlapping museum series Struth continued to photograph the world's cities, in colour predominantly and – especially in China and Japan – with people now permitted walk and cycle-on parts in the kind of scenes from which they had been conspicuously absent in the west. He also undertook expeditions to photograph forests and jungles where the tropical foliage was often so dense and lush as to resist the scrutiny the images compelled. They were powerful, these "New Pictures from Paradise", but perhaps they also signalled a lurking danger: how fertility and abundance can become self-obstructing, how the over-grown might turn into the over-blown.  It is difficult not to see some of the recent work – tangles of flex and wire, the manufactured equivalent of all that perspective-less, Pollock-esque vegetation – as evidence of a lack of direction or purpose. Make no mistake, Struth's best works earn their size, but the big recent pictures of very big things such as the construction of the Space Shuttle at Cape Canaveral – bigger than a snooker table: how's that for size – emphasise the scale of the emptiness and raise further doubts about where he might be headed. The accomplishments are undeniable but, on the eve of this retrospective, one is reminded (by Nietzsche) of "god's boredom on the seventh day of creation".  Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010 is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 from 6 July to 16 September 2011. www.whitechapelgallery.org
Deserted city streets, people gazing at famous paintings, dense jungle foliage and family portraits – the photographs of Thomas Struth explore memory and ways of looking. By Geoff Dyer