The fourteen photographs that made up this exhibition of recent work by Thomas Struth represent some of the strongest images of his career while also continuing a conversation about the fraught relationships among imagination, technology, place, and culture that the artist has been developing since the late 1970s. Looking at Struth’s photograph Ulsan 2, Lotte Hotel, 2010, depicting a hotel situated—we might say, embedded—in Ulsan, South Korea, one cannot help but note that this city, labyrinthine in its vertical and horizontal sprawl of starkly white buildings, comes to dominate the hills seen in the distance. The size of the picture, roughly five by ten feet, and its intricacy of detail make this reversal of context—the man-made rather than the natural determining an experience of space—feel inescapable. In other words, it is the city and its dense cluster of buildings and traffic that shape our sense of the landscape, that give it form and focus, rather than the landscape determining the boundaries of the city. Perhaps ironically, we can just barely see people in the image; mostly we see the results of the efforts of countless human beings made manifest in the form of the buildings, roads, cars—the vast array of urban structures—that represent the sum total of a sequence of interlinked decisions and actions. These buildings and the way they establish dominion over the whole area, Struth’s photograph reveals, are more than just pathological symptoms of capitalism and imperialism. They are multiform expressions of the ideas, beliefs, and even unspoken thoughts of our contemporary moment, since architecture and the infrastructure of daily life are not simply extensions of a collective experience—they constitute that experience. As an imagemaker, Struth is closer to Wittgenstein than to Marx. In the artist’s work, technology, here embodied by the city and all its disparate materiality, is not only the context of behavior but also a grammar of the material world.

The show offered a diverse range of subjects, from industrial sites to robotics research laboratories to a Disney theme park. In a picture of a work space in a Georgia Institute of Technology lab, we see cables, robotics, an animatronic baby dinosaur, and a whiteboard covered in dense calculations, the word LIKELY faintly inscribed among the tangle of numbers and variables. That word, with its intertwined implications of promise and probability, resonates across the exhibition. Throughout his career, Struth’s photographs have consistently taken on a generative struggle to hold a variety of moral positions in view simultaneously. On the one hand, the works reveal a profound concern with how technology can supplant humanity and allow the created spaces to bend everything to artifice and the artificial. On the other, one encounters in these images the ways in which technology becomes both the catalyst for an experience of the achievement of human imagination and a sign of the belief that what is most deeply human is the ongoing attempt to defy our own mortal limitations.

It seems apt, then, that Struth would turn his attention to Disneyland, a space characterized by a mix of technology, imagination, and the constructed, domesticated version of fantasy. Included in the exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery were seven images from the theme park in Anaheim, California. It would be too easy to see photographs such as Mountain, Anaheim, California, 2013, which portrays an artificial “mountain” overlooking a man-made lagoon occupied by two real submarines, as merely a deadpan depiction of hyperreality. Though there is room for critique of the proliferation of simulacra, we also need to identify what technology expresses, even when—especially when—that technology is also used to repress itself, as is the case with Disneyland, which keeps out of sight the elaborate mechanics used to make the fantasy possible. This stands in immediate contrast to the other sites Struth puts before our eyes: a surgery in Berlin, say, or a mill in Duisburg. One never forgets that Struth, with his camera, is employing technology to reveal the far-reaching networks of applied knowledge and imagination, and in so doing lays bare the ways in which technology can show us to ourselves. Where techne and poesis meet, we also find the contact zone of culture and psychology.

—Richard Deming