Free Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

Chirico emptiness. His paintings became more realistic, and cost him more effort, and, as they did so, he had an epiphany. “I realized, this takes too long,” he said over lunch in a Düsseldorf café. “And that I’m not interested in the painting process. I’m interested in making pictures. And if I’m not interested in spending time accurately rendering the shadows in the coat and getting the color of the hat right and stuff like that, I realized—”
    â€œYou realized that someone else or, rather, something else—a camera—could do this for you?” I cut in, imagining the eureka moment.
    â€œYes. After I started taking photographs from which I would make my paintings, I realized that the photograph already does it. The photograph already shows what I want to show. So why make a painting that takes me five months to finish and then it looks like a photograph?”
    â€œThat’s what the photo-realists did,” I said.
    â€œYes, but that’s naive. I remember when I first saw those paintings, I thought, That’s not very interesting. They are only trying to show they can paint. That’s not art.”
    Struth, of course, was mischaracterizing the photo-realist project—which was not to display painterly skills but to cast a cold eye on the psychopathology of mid-twentieth-century American life. The huge paintings of Airstream campers and gooey pies on luncheonette counters brought the details of the color photographs they were based on to an arresting, sometimes almost comical degree of visibility. These paintings were about scale—in much the way that the oversize photographs of Struth, Gursky, Wall, Höfer, et al. are—and in this sense they anticipated the new photography, though they were evidently not a conscious influence on the new photographers.
    Recalling his student days, Struth spoke of the atmosphere of seriousness that permeated the academy: “When I came there, it was a shock to realize that I had to regard art as a serious activity and develop a serious artistic practice. Painting and drawing was no longer my hobby, a private activity that I enjoyed. It was something that had categories. Artists were people who took positions and represented certain social and political attitudes. It was an intense experience to realize this. There was very intense judgment by the students—who is doing something interesting and who is an idiot painting lemons as if he were living in the time of Manet and Cézanne.”
    In a 1976 student exhibition at the academy, Struth showed forty-nine of the black-and-white photographs he had taken of empty Düsseldorf streets from a frontal perspective leading to a vanishing point, and the success of the series led to a scholarship in New York, where he did the work for which he was first known—black-and-white photographs of empty New York streets, again taken head-on. The assumption that these single-minded works were inspired by the Bechers’ über-single-minded photographs of industrial structures turns out to be wrong. As it happens, when Struth took his Düsseldorf pictures, he had not yet seen the Bechers’ photographs—another example of the zeitgeist’s uncanny ways.
    The Bechers are cult figures, known in the photography world for their “typologies” of water towers, gas tanks, workers’ houses, winding towers, and blast furnaces, among other forms of the industrial vernacular. In the late fifties, they began going around Germany, and then around the world, taking the same frontal portrait of each example of the type of structure under study, and arranging the portraits in grids of nine or twelve or fifteen, to bring out the individual variations. They did this for fifty years, never deviating from their austere formula: all the photographs were taken at the same aboveground-level height and under overcast skies (to eliminate shadows), as if they