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Seeing for the First and Last Time in Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs

In 1989, the German artist Thomas Struth began the Museum Photographs, producing photographic images of the visitor experience in Old Master collections. One of the last images in the series, Museo del Prado 7, Madrid 2005, a photograph of visitors in front of the painting Las Meninas, exemplifies the strategies at work within the Museum Photographs. This paper considers the relationship between representation and experience and asks: What does it mean to reproduce the museum experience by way of a photograph? It proposes that the photographs are thinking objects; in other words, the viewer gains critical awareness of his or her status as a museum visitor by engaging with the image. It considers the employment of metapictoriality and intermediality; these factors outline the limitations of the image’s production and impact on the way that a viewer interacts with the image. The implications of the relationship between representation and experience are arrived at through a process of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Engaging with the Museum Photographs is therefore a transformative experience.