Free Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm Page A

were specimens for a scientific monograph.
    Struth is reserved about the Bechers’ photographs, though he respects what he sees as the ideological backbone of their enterprise. “When Bernd and Hilla made this contract with themselves in the 1950s to catalog these kind of objects, German photography was all abstract subjectivism,” he said. “People didn’t want to look at reality, because what you saw in Germany in the fifties was destruction and the Holocaust. It was all a terrible reality, so precise looking was not a widespread impulse.” The Bechers’ precise looking was a model of ethical rigor. But Struth believes that “eventually their meaning in the history of art will be linked more with their teaching and the influence it had than with their work.”
    I asked Struth about the influence on him of the Bechers’ pedagogy.
    â€œTheir 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?”
    â€œIt’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust, that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theater.”
    â€œDid you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”
    â€œNo, no. I didn’t.”
    â€œHave you read Proust since?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSo what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”
    Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.
    â€œIt’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.
    Struth went on to contrast the beloved, haimish Bechers, whose classes were often held at their house or in a Chinese restaurant, with the “much more difficult to deal with” Gerhard Richter: “Gerhard was very ironic. I never had the feeling that he is someone who speaks naturally or openly. He was friendly, but you never knew what he really meant. It was very coded language and coded behavior.”
    Struth’s characterization of Richter did not surprise me. I had seen the portrait of him and his wife and two children that Struth took for The New York Times Magazine in 2002, on the occasion of a Richter retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is a beautifully composed picture of four people whose bodies are rigid with tension and whose staring faces illustrate different ways of looking hostile. White lilies in a glass vase and a picture of a skull on the wall reinforce the photograph’s primal unease.
    I was surprised to hear that Richter and his wife liked the picture.
    â€œIt’s a very sad and disturbing picture,” I said.
    â€œOkay,” Struth said.
    â€œThey do not look like a happy family.”
    â€œWell, that’s not the issue.”
    â€œThat almost is the issue of the picture.”
    Struth conceded that “they don’t look relaxed and happy,” and added, “He’s not an easy person, that’s for sure. He’s a very particular person.”
    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