Thomas Struth is well knwon for his large-scale museum interiors, portraits and architectural photography, however this new monograph presents another facet of Struth's oeuvre, assembling a series of flower photographs produced for a unique project. In fact in 1991, Struth was commissioned to decorate a new hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland for which he decided to produce two flower photographs and a landscape for each of the 37 sickrooms. Although the hospital team had imagined Struth might make street photographs, he decided to concentrate on those subjects patients might be ‘missing’: images of local landscapes and flowers with an intense colour. The landscapes Struth photographed were all made in the area around Winterthur, including views of the Thur Valley, nearby vineyards and farmland as well as the hospital gardens. These pictures brilliantly and colorfully sunthesize a tradition of landscape and flower photography which goes back to Edward Weston, Walker Evans and August Sander.
“ In the hospital, the body is in a heightened condition, even in a state of alarm. This led me to choose an approach where one particular detail of each flower would be highlighted, as an analogy to the condition of illness in which one part of the body that we are usually not so aware of becomes the centre of attention. „