Thomas Struth

Yosemite is just one of the remaining old-growth forests around the world where Thomas Struth has set up his large view camera. His stated intention with these photographs is not to make an ecological, romantic, or socioeconomic statement but to immerse the viewer in a dense jungle of trunks, branches, and foliage and inspire feelings of being overwhelmed and confused, reminding us, perhaps, of how ignorant we have become about finding our way home—to nature or any other imagined paradise. Struth says of Paradies: “I didn’t want to portray a specific place, that specific forest. Rather I was trying to feel within its primeval branchings the moment of beginning that once was the world.”