1426 JAPAN (Chūgoku) - The Hirose Family, Hiroshima, 1987

"Families Struth discovered parallels with his street scenes in the classic family portrait, moved here too by the desire to invoke the unfamiliar and the unconscious from behind a clichéd and generic surface. His family portraits are always taken under the same conditions: the initiative must come from the artist (with a very few exceptions, Struth’s portraits are not commissioned); the family in question, in consultation with Struth himself, determine the location for the shoot and its framing in their garden or home; finally, while it is up to the family to decide on how to arrange themselves and what poses to strike, they are always asked to look directly into the camera." it says on the website of Kunsthaus Zürich, an art gallery in the Swiss city of Zürich.

Thomas Struth (born on 1954 in Geldern) is a German photographer who is best known for his family portraits and 1970's large format black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York. He trained at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting, and then photography. In the mid-1980s, after a meeting with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann, he started to produce family portraits, some of which are in colour and others in black and white. He casts a neutral and somewhat remote eye on the world and its inhabitants, photographing them with great impartiality, as an observer of the state of things. The group spans three generations with age being the significant aspect of the relationships between individuals, exploring the idea of connectedness, a context in which a person’s appearance, personality and psychology are formed.

About the stamp
The stamp is part of Green Progress set, about which I wrote here.

References
Thomas Struth -Wikipedia
Thomas Struth - Kunsthaus Zürich website
Press Release: Thomas Struth - National Portrait Gallery website
The Hirose Family, Hiroshima - collection.fraclorraine.org

Sender: Kwong Sang / Hydrogencyanide (postcrossing) NL-1345230
Sent from Tilburg (North Brabant / Netherlands), on 27.07.2012
Photo: Thomas Struth / 1987