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Lot Essay
'Travelling through California and Nevada with my brother in 1998, we reached Yosemite National Park and El Capitan one afternoon and discovered its famous steep face from a perfectly angled vista approaching on Northside Drive. In the bright light, the mountain climbers hanging off the face in their hammocks were barely visible, even to the naked eye. The number of people just stopping their cars briefly, on the broadened side of the road, to get out and snap a picture of the granite monolith with their digital cameras was astonishing.
A drive-through natural monument, an example of fast-forward change of time and circumstance, body and imagination, gain and loss, El Capitan appeared as a celebrity monument, a toy, an object to be marked off of the travel list.
In an instant, my impression of the scenery bridged different eras of photography, of travel, imagination and the relationship between body and mind. It's almost as if the subject was more picture than mountain'
(T. Struth, Berlin, 10 September 2010).
Taking the vast rock formation of El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park as its inspiration, Thomas Struth's El Capitan, Yosemite National Park fits within the artist's ambition to create photographic images that capture how human lives are affected and even controlled by their environment. Presented on a grand scale, the blinding white cliff face of the rock formation dominates the picture plane. Framed by the steady stream of tourist-filled cars dwarfed by the towering boulder, Struth's perspective places the viewer within the image, granting us the same point of view as the onlookers. An iconic image in Struth's oeuvre owing to its bright, captivating vista, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park has been exhibited widely including the artist's retrospective at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas which later travelled to The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Chicago.
Situated within Struth's celebrated Places of Worship series in the 1990s, his initial inquiry into capturing religious institutions broadened over the decade to include compelling sites of powerful secular significance. Growing out of his seminal photograph Pantheon, 1990, between 1995 and 2003 Struth made an 'extended family' of photographs ranging from Milan Cathedral, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to the Buddhist temple Tdai-ji, a version of which is in Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, to tourist sites such as El Capitan which incorporated groups of people congregating at places which, in Struth's eyes, offer 'monumental emotional packages of overwhelming experience' (T. Struth, quoted in A. Kruszynski, T. Bezzola, J. Lingwood (eds)., Thomas Struth Photographs 1978 - 2010, New York 2004, p. 204). Rooted in the relationship between image and ideology, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park conveys an awe-inspiring sense of spirituality through its own overwhelming size, the mountain visually and physically dominates both the composition and the people in front it with the same presence as a massive cathedral.
Transforming the tourists into pilgrims, Struth depicts El Capitan as a new kind of secular centre of human interaction offering up a contemporary vision of Divine Providence in the transcendent, primeval formation. Struth's subject is replete with allusions to both contemporary visual culture and American landscape photography, El Capitan having also been the subject of photographs by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Ansel Adams each who struggled through epic journeys to arrive at Yosemite to photograph this vista.. Reconceptualised through Struth's lens, El Capitan is depicted as an active centre of human interest and interaction. By focusing on its role as tourist destination, Struth places this monument as the subject of countless holiday photographs. In doing so, Struth does not merely document how places look, nor does he merely reduce the fabric of our urban life to abstraction, but instead, he attempts to grasp and convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world. By capturing the tourists within the frame, Struth transforms the landscape to the intersection of nature, technology, and culture, the subject of the photograph becoming the larger than the El Capitan itself.
A drive-through natural monument, an example of fast-forward change of time and circumstance, body and imagination, gain and loss, El Capitan appeared as a celebrity monument, a toy, an object to be marked off of the travel list.
In an instant, my impression of the scenery bridged different eras of photography, of travel, imagination and the relationship between body and mind. It's almost as if the subject was more picture than mountain'
(T. Struth, Berlin, 10 September 2010).
Taking the vast rock formation of El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park as its inspiration, Thomas Struth's El Capitan, Yosemite National Park fits within the artist's ambition to create photographic images that capture how human lives are affected and even controlled by their environment. Presented on a grand scale, the blinding white cliff face of the rock formation dominates the picture plane. Framed by the steady stream of tourist-filled cars dwarfed by the towering boulder, Struth's perspective places the viewer within the image, granting us the same point of view as the onlookers. An iconic image in Struth's oeuvre owing to its bright, captivating vista, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park has been exhibited widely including the artist's retrospective at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas which later travelled to The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Chicago.
Situated within Struth's celebrated Places of Worship series in the 1990s, his initial inquiry into capturing religious institutions broadened over the decade to include compelling sites of powerful secular significance. Growing out of his seminal photograph Pantheon, 1990, between 1995 and 2003 Struth made an 'extended family' of photographs ranging from Milan Cathedral, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to the Buddhist temple Tdai-ji, a version of which is in Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, to tourist sites such as El Capitan which incorporated groups of people congregating at places which, in Struth's eyes, offer 'monumental emotional packages of overwhelming experience' (T. Struth, quoted in A. Kruszynski, T. Bezzola, J. Lingwood (eds)., Thomas Struth Photographs 1978 - 2010, New York 2004, p. 204). Rooted in the relationship between image and ideology, El Capitan, Yosemite National Park conveys an awe-inspiring sense of spirituality through its own overwhelming size, the mountain visually and physically dominates both the composition and the people in front it with the same presence as a massive cathedral.
Transforming the tourists into pilgrims, Struth depicts El Capitan as a new kind of secular centre of human interaction offering up a contemporary vision of Divine Providence in the transcendent, primeval formation. Struth's subject is replete with allusions to both contemporary visual culture and American landscape photography, El Capitan having also been the subject of photographs by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Ansel Adams each who struggled through epic journeys to arrive at Yosemite to photograph this vista.. Reconceptualised through Struth's lens, El Capitan is depicted as an active centre of human interest and interaction. By focusing on its role as tourist destination, Struth places this monument as the subject of countless holiday photographs. In doing so, Struth does not merely document how places look, nor does he merely reduce the fabric of our urban life to abstraction, but instead, he attempts to grasp and convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world. By capturing the tourists within the frame, Struth transforms the landscape to the intersection of nature, technology, and culture, the subject of the photograph becoming the larger than the El Capitan itself.