Published by MACK in 2016, Nature & Politics accompanies a museum exhibition of Thomas Struth’s work made after the period covered by his 1978–2010 retrospective. Bringing together 65 works, including all 30 photographs shown in the exhibition, it offers an extensive account of a decisive recent phase in the German artist’s practice.

Struth is known for developing distinct bodies of work around architecture, portraiture and landscape. Here, those established fields meet his sustained investigation of technological and scientific environments: physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and operating theatres. The photographs attend to machines, structures and working environments as instruments through which contemporary knowledge is produced, while also suggesting the less visible systems of control and power embedded in advanced technology. The subject is not innovation as spectacle, but the material conditions in which human ambition becomes concrete.

The book also places these images alongside two contrasting projects. In Disneyland, Struth photographs a constructed environment where technology turns imagined worlds into physical experience. In Israel and Palestine, by contrast, his images move across urban views, portraits, landscapes and technological sites, allowing his normally separate subject categories to overlap within a contested region. This expanded range gives the collection its particular force: it examines how the human imagination is built, staged and imposed upon the world.

For collectors, Nature & Politics is significant as a substantial monograph of Struth’s later work and as a carefully framed record of the concerns that came to dominate it. Its 214 pages and 95 colour plates present the work in the context of a museum project rather than as an isolated sequence, while texts by Tobia Bezzola, Dirk Baecker and D. Graham Burnett extend its artistic and intellectual frame. The result is a serious document of Struth’s movement between ordered photographic categories and the complicated realities that resist them.