Homage to Thomas Struth / by Claudia Phares

These portraits were inspired from Thomas Struth’s series on ‘Friends and Families’.

Janice Guy, Naples 1988 by Thomas Struth

Fake it ‘til you make it - Project 7: Thomas Struth

I chose the German photographer Thomas Struth because I was interested in his simple and spare portraits of families and friends. I read he collaborated with a psychoanalyst for his project on family portraits and scrutinised relationships between family members. For my project, I wanted to explore the idea of a modern family and so shot my friends, Lise & Ben, who I met through our dogs. They were shot in their own art studio (studio Pardon). I used a Mamiya medium format camera with a roll of 120 Tmax 400. I processed and printed the film in the VCA lab. I had never printed from a 120 mm film and I was really happy with the results: the tonal range of the actual print is amazing compared to the scanned version here which has lost a lot of detail.

 5 elements used:

  1. black and white film
  2. natural lighting
  3. subjects in their own surroundings
  4. intimate portraiture
  5. truth teling photography