The Dandelion Room

This monograph presents another facet of Thomas Struth's oeuvre, assembling a series of flower photographs produced for a unique project. In 1991, Struth was commissioned to decorate a new hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. He decided to produce two flower photographs and a landscape for each of the 37 sickrooms. The flower photographs were to be hung on the wall behind the bed, the landscape on the opposite wall. With this project, Struth hoped to bring the captivating environment of the Winterthur area into the interior space of the hospital, connecting patients to the outside word. The images for the hospital shift between documentary objectivity and painterly qualities of light and shadow. Beautifully reproduced here, these pictures brilliantly and colorfully synthesize a tradition of landscape photography that includes Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and August Sander with the tradition of 19th century flower and landscape painting.