O my friends, there is no friend.¹

Something strange happens when one becomes involved with the work of Thomas Struth. In looking at and studying this photography one becomes more and more convinced of its sincerity and truth. Trust grows, and especially in the portraits, friendships are made. Instead of highlighting something like mediation, which has become a critical byword of late, Struth's photography turns on a natural and almost living connection between form and content. Moreover, rather than undermining what adequation there might be between form and content, serious and sustained involvement with Struth's photography enhances and builds upon this identification. One is tempted to say that the narrative engineered upon first encounter with Struth's work is progressively rounded out in encounters thereafter, so much so that soon one is confronting the likes of an old friend or favourite haunt.

Take a work like Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987. If awkward at first, narrative inches ever closer to the beautiful. What communicative potential possessed by the portrait inevitably opens up to further dialogues and deeper, more intimate bonds. A lunch-time meal has just been cleared, a stain still marks the table. A favourite book is brought out to end the fumbling. Can you see it? A whole life is revealed: a life of learning and urbanity, of the most gracious kind of bourgeois civility. If you are lucky, such narration is helped along by the individual sitters themselves, or someone else who simply knows the story or the circumstances surrounding a life lived, or an afternoon many years ago. If not, then the kind of storytelling that ideally surrounds Struth's photography is limited to the act of interpretation itself, in which case identification takes its usual time. Of course, there are photographs that leave one cold as well. But then, one always has favourites, and affinities for a certain face or way of being, a particular street or a building, always make a world of difference.

What is strange about all this is not simply the propensity to form an interpersonal relation with a photograph, but even more that Struth's photographs seem to expect, depend on, and actively pursue this kind of bond with the viewer. What is strange is that something like friendship is not only sustained but deepened over time; and what's more, over a period of time which is rightly described as that of critical engagement. The fact is that in the context of Struth's work the scepticism that runs through much contemporary photography, as well as its criticism, is made superfluous. Truth is never in question, precisely because the bonds of friendship are always in place.

In terms of Struth's place in the history of photography this can be explained as a reaction to the strict objectivity of the Düsseldorf School; specifically a loosening up of the question of typology and the undermining of its rigid instrumentality through the question of immediacy or presence. The singularity of Struth's work seems to efface referential categories such as genre or motif. The seriality or repetition characteristic of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher is certainly operating, but not to the same extent. The newness of the first encounter with someone or something is too important. One can group his pictures according to an obdurate epistemology like 'house, street, individual, group' as in the title of an early catalogue, but what help is this?² If one is to account for the fact of surprise or wonder in the face of the new or different in each case, even these categorisations demand refining.

Struth's museum photographs are a good example. Certainly Musée du Louvre I, Paris, 1989, and Musée du Louvre II, Paris, 1989 play the part of 18th- or 19th-century salon scene painting - the Salle Mollien and the Salle des Etats providing a backdrop for a contemporary gallery going public - but there is something far more ordinary about them as well.³ In each case there is a certain immediacy to the throng or the circle of children that grounds each work in the everyday; in the particularities of a certain space and time. If the folds of a blue coat, a boy's self-conscious look outwards, or the upward gesticulations of the teacher's hands mobilise this in the latter, the painterly glances and many gestures of the crowd accomplish this in the former. The tight mimetic relation between photographed figures and painted figures is something to which only the momentary can give rise. It is precisely this wonder at the other in its immediacy that makes Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987

exemplary of Struth's work as a whole.

What I am trying to isolate is a colouring or sensualising of instrumental reason. I imagine it emerging out of simply looking at the Bechers' work.⁴ It is something that rests not only on an awareness of how such a cold and rigorous practice is read or inhabited by a viewer, but just as much on how a picture might unsettle the conditions of the latter through something bordering on surprise. In a work like Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987 instrumental reason is shot through with a kind of pathos. Over what one can only assume is a long afternoon, I take it for granted that a rapport has developed and a certain familiarity grown between the photographer and the subject.⁵ Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987 is a moment rooted in this shared history. Though there are equally compelling examples from other locations and histories around the world - consider Beata and Kata Laszlo, Venezia 1995; Family Okutsu, Yamaguchi 1996 or Anna Grefe, Düsseldorf 1997 - in this case Struth's humanism is grounded in a particular set of material relations built up over a number of afternoons and worked through over the course of a couple of years. Struth's photography hinges on what minimal adequation is forged between form and content herein.

Acknowledging this minimal adequation, or lack of identity between form and content, is crucial. It places itself at a distance from contemporary liberal theory at the same time as it recognizes that the success and failure of this photography pivots on what liberal theory would claim as the immediately social and communicative dimension of living labour. Thus recent commentators on Struth can claim that his pictures 'belong to the subject. In a way that counts, the subject authors the picture,'⁶ or that 'the picture has been allowed to form itself.'⁷ Tempting characterisations though they might be, such conclusions deny the viewer's own hand in constructing the identity of the other. This blindness is something Montaigne's 'O my friends, there is no friend' both courts and escapes. In a single breath one is swept up by the identification promised by friendship and a resistance to the truth of its beautiful illusion. In the instance of Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987 the motivation that binds form to content can be nothing other than the reproduction of an extant social reality. Minimal adequation is what identity continually represses.⁸ It is always framed by the naturalisation of difference. So if history (local, personal, social, cultural) is given its due, it gains a voice only by virtue of translation, through a process of projection which finishes off or idealises an incomplete relation only tending toward that of classical identity.

Given the circumstances, it seems that Struth's project amounts to an attempt to think both friendship as well as the alienation incurred by this very mystification. For at one and the same time one detects a sympathy for a kind of democratic tolerance and ethical responsibility as well as an investment in the notion of instrumental reason. As Derrida has shown, friendship is the axiom of the political, and if 'the properly political act or operation amounts to creating (to producing, to making) the most friendship possible',⁹ then Struth's photography takes the stability of identity as a departure for rethinking the terms of the democratic. How it does so is the crucial question. To answer this we will have to confront Struth's photography as symbol and how this is undermined by a notion of allegory, that is, as a celebration of friendship and a testament to friendship broken.

There is a picture of Gerhard Richter in a museum in Madrid from 1994 that clarifies what we are up against. Richter is seated in the foreground with his paintings in the background. What the piece speaks of, in a general sense, is that in Struth's work the essence of photography has to be thought in tension with the history it represses: that of painting. That there is a substantive connection between photography and painting in the case of Richter that goes to the heart of the matter. The point is that the causal nature of photography - the relation that led me just now to pose this photograph as something entirely other, as illustrative of a larger truth - is necessarily placed in tension with questions hinging on photography as a mere effect. To reformulate this as a linguistic problematic, one would have to call in both the motivated nature of the symbol and the arbitrary condition of the sign. The problem is that there is nothing arbitrary about Struth's photograph. The paintings behind Richter, or for that matter behind Robertson, do not unravel narrative at all - as the arbitrary sign of painting should. Instead of distancing us from identity, painting provides photography with a kind of deep history that validates precisely its truth criteria. Richter's history is well enough known. In the case of Robertson it is important to realize that he was not only a distinguished art historian but a significant collector and connoisseur of Italian painting. Rather than an example of linguistic mediation, painting opens on to a rich interior life.

This is the interpretative problematic par excellence in Struth's photography. Let it stand as the limit of any critical encounter with his work, for try as one might to turn a motivated relation into an arbitrary relation one will fail. One should be able to puncture the necessity of photography by pointing up its painterly aspects, yet not only does the minimal adequation between form and content hold up under scrutiny, it becomes stronger as critical engagement proceeds. Struth's work depends upon this act of identification to such a degree that its status as photography is incomplete without it. In a sense, the work counts on being looked at. In fact, the unity of Struth's photography, the very truth of this photography, rests on the structural relation actualised upon viewing. That one is blind to this structural predicament in the experience of looking is the defining characteristic of the 'intentional object', an object assumed to be natural but in fact intended to be looked at.¹⁰ If we are to grasp both friendship and its unraveling, it is the structural relation animated by viewing and what is taken for granted within it, where we must focus our critical attention.

That identity cannot be simply shooed away like some bothersome insect. It remains a problem for, in effect, one is faced by truth in its insistent appearance. In Struth's work the status of photography as a language of presence or transparency is never in question. Truth always shines through. Here is ground zero of what is commonly held to be the aesthetic: the moment of the symbol, when concept and idea are one, or part and whole identical. The truth photography reveals rests on an analogy with philosophy. Like philosophy's relation to literature, photography's relation to painting is founded on the correctness of its language. Truth is intrinsic to the technology of photography, precisely because it possesses an indexical value that painting does not. As in the case of philosophy, photography hinges on the assumption that language is no longer an obstacle to expression. If literature and painting are plagued by the arbitrary nature of the sign the metaphysic of both philosophy and photography supposes that form and content are identical, or that difference can emerge in the world.

If we are to arrive at a complete accounting of Struth's work, photography as symbol will need to be deconstructed. Struth's project turns on staging photography as the paradigmatic medium or technology of the symbol in order to think the question of viewing. The symbol is not resistant to linguistic critique. The instrumental function of language should take hold of the set of organic metaphors holding truth in place and turn these into a question of mere effect: a question of painting.

We know from the work of Paul de Man, that the tension we have been concentrating on between photography and painting - no less than the slippery relation this entertains with philosophy and literature -- can be radicalised as the binary opposition between photography and rhetoric or philosophy and rhetoric. For our purposes his most succinct statement on this issue hinges on the central place accorded the symbol in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. It is entirely apropos the predicament of Struth's photography, vis-à-vis the work of the Bechers, that de Man sets his argument against an interpretative backdrop that reads Hegel as 'a theoretician of the symbol who fails to respond to symbolic language.'11 What is at stake in both Hegel's and Struth's usage of the symbol is a rhetoric of immediacy.12 Simply put, the nature of the symbol is bound up in the simultaneous, arbitrary or painterly ascription of meaning by the viewer: 'predication ... is always citational.'¹³ De Man writes,

The 'I' in its freedom from sensory determination, is originally similar to

the sign. Since, however, it states itself as what it is not, it represents as

determined a relationship to the world that is in fact arbitrary, that is to

say, it states itself as symbol. To the extent that the 'I' points to itself,

it is a sign, but to the extent that it speaks of anything but itself, it is a

symbol. The relationship between sign and symbol, however, is one of mutual

obliteration; hence the temptation to confuse and to forget the distinction

between them.¹⁴

This clarifies many things. First and foremost it puts the question of the aesthetic in the harshest possible light. One glimpses the relation that it has always sustained with wonder and the technology of othering that wonder has fulfilled within discourses of discovery.¹⁵ One sees 'truth' and how conflicted it is, or indeed the beautiful and how it is implicated in a structure of power. If couched in the bond of friendship, the instancing of the subject turns on a far more violent appropriation of the world. In Struth's photography one is always glimpsing this use, because of the emphasis placed on identity and the impediments put in the way of unrestrained narcissistic projection or identification. Struth's photographs are allegorical to the extent that narration underwrites what perception posits as present or determined.¹⁶ In fact, the identity posited by Struth's photography always stands as an 'allegory of reading'.¹⁷

Consider again the tired subject matter of Musée du Louvre I, Paris 1989, and Musée du Louvre II, Paris 1989. What is striking about each is the significance of the immediate, and that the immediate is stripped of any real importance by virtue of the series. Thus, in spite of occupying a place in a series or actively referencing the series as a whole or the other pictures in it, each picture references its very own peculiar conditions of viewing. Typology, which in the work of the Bechers functions as an external relation between discreet moments, has here become a problematic internal to the singular event. Like the natural relation engineered between form and content in the portraits, the spatial analogy here forged between figures of photography and figures of painting depends on an act of viewing. While in the Bechers' work one is confronted by a series of flatly arbitrary moments which gain meaning only through reference to one another, in this pairing one is confronted by a series of symbolic moments. If in the Bechers' work, time is a mere contingency in Struth's work it is the defining category. In the latter, the identity between photography and painting in each, because mimetic or spatially bound, is entirely a function of an allegorical movement.

In his most recent photographs of the American landscape this passage is as significant. Look at the unchanging face of nature in Nevada I, Nevada 1999. Here the beauty of wide-open spaces is no less the sign of a subject looking to the perceived world for a depth it in fact lacks. If the picture describes a fairly systematic world of differences - conjuring infinite depth as surface - it poses as well the question of perception's correspondence to a temporal movement that narrates these events. Set at an interminable distance, this landscape has eyes. They place the process of identification implicit in the machinery of the symbol under pressure. They thematise a limit beyond which interpretation is blind, pointing up a passage or negative moment in a dialectic which is continually secreted away. Quite frankly the wide open is a symbol of identity and truth, but as well a sign of what identification continually veils, a distance between the human and natural world. As an embodiment of immediacy in all its rawness, this unknown section of the American landscape is the most natural of subjects Struth could take up. Not because it is any different from a designated natural wonder like El Capitan or indeed distinct from even a marvel like Treasure Island in Las Vegas, but simply because 'wonder knows no exit from the unordinariness of the most ordinary.'¹⁸

Thus too, the viewer of Struth's museum photography: stopped dead in his/her tracks, rapt in awe, or taken by surprise. Thus, the baffled people, astonished people, the contemplative, devotional, stupefied, frenzied people all wondering about truth, beauty, and art. As a figure of immediacy, the very essence of surprise, wonder has an uncanny ability for unsettling the relations between cause and effect. Like the tension between symbol and allegory - which has to a large extent rehabilitated both the philosophical and rhetorical legacy of wonder in contemporary theory - wonder has the capacity of shifting attention from the object to the subject; from the question of the symbol to that of the sign. From an identification between painting and photography to a disjunction between these binaries; that is, to an act of narration where the reconciliation of the binary is engineered. In wondering, perception is continually shown wanting. Its 'truth' is found to reside, not in the image, but rather in an irrecoupable allegorical relation to an elementary and practical confrontation with the world - a temporal relation continually repressed by a philosophy, which John Llewelyn reminds us, is said to begin in wonder.¹⁹

Look at the woman with the stroller in Struth's Art Institute of Chicago II, Chicago 1990. Much has been made of her position vis-à-vis the perspectival construction of Caillebotte's painting.²⁰ And no wonder! It is as if she has taken the street scene before her as an extension of her own space. The same holds true for the woman nearer the painting on the right. What is also undoubtedly true is that each of these figures, are simultaneously engaged in another kind of reflection. Clasping ones hands behind ones back is as earnest a gesture of this as the apparently slow, reverential approach of the other.

For the woman with the stroller, experience and the representation of this experience are two sides of the same coin. Both philosopher and rhetorician, 'mimic' and 'actor', the irony of her situation is paradigmatic of that predicament which grips the viewer in face of Struth's photography.²¹ For one's capacity to reflect upon the image is grounded upon a blindness to one's empathic involvement with it. One could say that though a philosophical knowledge of the image is grounded in the performance of a set of practical linguistic and rhetorical competences, the meaning made denies this. Though one might use the language of photography like a rhetorician, one treats the language of photography like a philosopher. In Struth's photograph the likes of a minor philosopher extricates herself from a form of object perception that relies upon walking the streets of a painting. And yet, what is also clear is that one must resist the temptation to hypostatise this mimetic act over and above that of meaning made: each is as much a mystification. Being seduced by the perspectival construction of an image and distancing oneself from this seduction is a familiar enough experience for viewers of Struth's work.²² But then, so too is anxiously worrying away about the problem of truth or the identity between form and content. For Struth's work is not ultimately concerned with these categories of the interpersonal. Friendship figures a kind of correspondence that is far more fugitive. In it one hears a faint echo of what Walter Benjamin called the 'just past.' For what is at stake in Struth's photography is a thorough going materialism, a notion of meaning-making in which the viewer listens to the work and responds in kind.²³

I would like to thank Alan Johnston, Robert Robertson, Stephen Waddell and John Llewelyn for their help in thinking about this essay. I would also like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.

— Shepherd Steiner