Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life

Richard Deming | Psyche | 14th December 2020

A meditation on urban life. Thomas Struth’s photographs of empty streets are acclaimed. What is their allure? Crowded streets sometimes convey “the evidence of people, but no real community”. When empty, New York’s streets show that city “was never a gentle place … What’s revealed is an intrinsic feeling of abandonment that exists below the surface of all human spaces.”