These works are drawn from Struth’s early practice, which primarily consists of street perspectives. They express a technical precision, sense of order, and neutrality that can be linked to the Becher’s “New Objectivity” curriculum.
Both Planetenstrasse and Humboldtstrasse document a particular time and place in German history: one a West German city and the other, made twenty years later, in a former East German city after the nation’s reunification. The photographs speak to individual experiences of belonging and alienation in the late twentieth-century German urban environment.