Skip to Main Content

Of Times and Spaces: On Looking at Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer

Charles W. Haxthausen, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Williams College. “My work,” the German photo artist Candida Höfer has said, “is about making images of spaces.” Yet both she and fellow photographer Thomas Struth are equally interested in the dimension of time andthe evidence of layers of history in the spaces they photograph. Although Struth’s and Höfer’s photographs are inevitably the products of a single exposure, of a unique, fugitive moment, their images manifest a temporal complexity and transparency. Recorded on January 13, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, the lecture by Professor Haxthausen explores the ways in which these artists’ work complicates how we think about the relationship of photography to time.

01/29/13