Broad Street, New York/Wall Street, 1978 (1993)

About the Work

The big city looks as if it has died out: a dark stretch of street with high-rise buildings and parked cars, but not a single person in sight. The sunlight at the end of the street is reflected in the facades, and a small patch of sky can be seen between the houses. The detail shown in the picture places the viewer exactly in the middle of the street and confronts him with the emptiness of the asphalt. Thomas Struth first studied painting at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf but in the mid-1970s went to study under the German photographer Bernd Becher. Soon after, he was awarded a scholarship for New York, where he concentrated on the empty streets in the early morning and recorded them in black-and-white photographs.