Paradise 25, Yuquehy, Brazil, 2001
Coloured photograph
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2003
German photographer Thomas Struth created his celebrated Paradise or New Pictures from Paradise series in the late 1990s. In these monumental colour photographs, Struth turned his attention to dense forests and rainforest environments in locations including Australia, Brazil, Peru, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Germany, producing immersive images that contain no visible human presence or intervention. Instead, the viewer encounters overwhelming layers of tangled vegetation, branches, vines, moss, and foliage that fill the entire frame without a single dominant focal point or horizon line. Struth intentionally avoids presenting nature as a romantic postcard or sentimental vision of Eden; rather, he explores the idea of paradise as psychologically complex, mysterious, and resistant to easy interpretation. The photographs invite prolonged contemplation and silence, encouraging viewers to become aware of how they perceive detail, depth, and order within apparent chaos—alluding to the magnificence and force of nature as something larger than us.
Printed on a large scale, the works physically surround the viewer and intensify the immersive effect, recalling both Romantic landscape painting and meditative traditions associated with Zen contemplation. The compositional structure creates a sensation of visual disorientation, forcing the eye to wander continuously through the image and making the act of looking itself central to the experience. The work can be interpreted as an exploration of the tension between structure and disorder, civilisation and wilderness, and human perception versus the incomprehensible complexity of the natural world. Struth himself has described the images as being almost like “illegible text”, emphasising that the photographs are less about documenting specific places than about creating an experience of visual and emotional absorption within nature’s dense, fascinating and often ungraspable complexity.
Thomas Struth was born in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He lives and works in Berlin and New York.
