I took the day off yesterday and spent it getting some culture in Chicago.
Museum of Contemporary Art
The exhibit at the MCA of large format photography by Thomas Struth was our first stop. Struth, a painter turned photographer, has recently focused his camera on urban landscapes and how they comment on contemporary culture and our place within it. There’s also a series of photographs taken inside art galleries, shot at a distance so that the public viewing the art is prominent in the picture. In these, he’s illuminating the ways in which people look at art, some sitting calmly on a bench taking in the entire gallery, others leaning forward intent on a detail of the work, and some who are bored, completely disengaged from the art. Layer is applied upon layer when you realize that you’re looking at a work of art of others looking at…a work of art. Also included are shots taken inside the Pantheon in Rome and the cathedral in Milan.
Struth’s photographs are fascinating in the amount of detail they capture, even in what at first appears to be a relatively simple subject, such as Tokyo rail lines stretching out for miles or a mass of green leaves and vines in the Australian jungle. Some photos invite you to step up and marvel at the details of everyday life, caught at the moment when the shutter clicked. A large photo of Notre Dame lets you study the individual statues adorning the building, and the throng of tourists lining up outside to enter, or standing on the street looking up, pointing or snapping photographs of their own. Each photograph is like a real-life Where’s Waldo game. Struth likens it to compacting an entire 365 page book into one image. The exhibit is completely engaging and fun to explore.
I found the room of family portraits the least interesting. I don’t really agree with the artist that these photos show the families as they truly are (no posed portrait really can if you ask me) and I didn’t find the composition to be that interesting. The smaller black-and-white photographs of empty city streets from the ’80s and ’90s I thought were quite depressing as a whole, but seeing them together did illuminate how some things are the same where ever you go. All-in-all, I’d recommend the exhibit to anyone interested in photography, or any sort of art that shows us the everyday in new ways. The exhibit is at the MCA through September 28th.
