Paradise 18 (Emai Shan), Yunnan Province

The work of Thomas Struth radically altered the place of the photographic image in contemporary art. Employing innovative printing techniques to produce large color images, he has focused on a finite range of subjects, including art institutions, landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits. In his Paradise series, the artist decontextualized the locations he illustrated by limiting his camera to shots of dense vegetation, thus removing the places from a geographic or historical context. Epic in scale, classical in composition, and formally precise, Struth’s work, as he explained, “is less about expanding the possibilities of photography than about reinvesting it with a truer perception of things by returning to a simple method, one that photography has had from the beginning of its existence.”