![“[Thomas Struth’s] monumental (fifty-seven by seventy-four inches) portrait of the eight members of the Ayvar family, in Lima, is a rare encounter with poverty. That the family is poor may be inferred from the room in which they sit—a piece of plasterboard with cracks in it appears behind the group, the foreground shows part of a patterned velvet sofa over which a sheet has been thrown to hide something torn or ruined, a dark muddy linoleum covers the floor, a small cheap religious print hangs high on the wall. Clearly the spareness of the room is an object not of advanced taste but of want, of not having the things that advanced taste keeps at bay. The family members—a tiny, dark-haired mother, a gray-haired father, and six children, ranging in age from a seven- or eight-year-old boy to a grown son and daughter—sit at a small table facing the photographer. A current sympathy runs between the subjects and the photographer that brings to mind the sympathy that flowed between Walker Evans and the sharecropper family he photographed in Dust Bowl Alabama, in the nineteen-thirties. But with this difference: Evans’s black-and-white photographs are heavyhearted pictures. They show the hopelessness of the struggle of the people they dignify and beautify. The smell of poverty wafts out of them. If any smell wafts out of the photograph of the Ayvars, it is that of laundry detergent. The father’s crisply ironed short-sleeved dress shirt, the children’s neat white and pastel-colored T-shirts, decorated with cartoons, and, most conspicuously, the bleached white cloth draped over the table, every stitch of whose green-and-red cross-stitched border is made visible, you could almost say celebrated, by the oversized print’s magnification—all this creates a gestalt that is far removed from that of the rueful Evans’s homage to the dirt-poor. As with all Struth’s photographs, it is hard to say what ‘statement’ it makes, but its note is characteristically cheering, even elating. The dazzling white cross-stitched tablecloth (to which the eye is drawn as if to a central figure) emblematizes the work’s optimism, like that of an Easter Sunday service—or an encounter with a friendly photographer.”
-Janet Malcolm, “Depth of Field”](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls5kojEWGe1qa2y0jo1_500.jpg)
“[Thomas Struth’s] monumental (fifty-seven by seventy-four inches) portrait of the eight members of the Ayvar family, in Lima, is a rare encounter with poverty. That the family is poor may be inferred from the room in which they sit—a piece of plasterboard with cracks in it appears behind the group, the foreground shows part of a patterned velvet sofa over which a sheet has been thrown to hide something torn or ruined, a dark muddy linoleum covers the floor, a small cheap religious print hangs high on the wall. Clearly the spareness of the room is an object not of advanced taste but of want, of not having the things that advanced taste keeps at bay. The family members—a tiny, dark-haired mother, a gray-haired father, and six children, ranging in age from a seven- or eight-year-old boy to a grown son and daughter—sit at a small table facing the photographer. A current sympathy runs between the subjects and the photographer that brings to mind the sympathy that flowed between Walker Evans and the sharecropper family he photographed in Dust Bowl Alabama, in the nineteen-thirties. But with this difference: Evans’s black-and-white photographs are heavyhearted pictures. They show the hopelessness of the struggle of the people they dignify and beautify. The smell of poverty wafts out of them. If any smell wafts out of the photograph of the Ayvars, it is that of laundry detergent. The father’s crisply ironed short-sleeved dress shirt, the children’s neat white and pastel-colored T-shirts, decorated with cartoons, and, most conspicuously, the bleached white cloth draped over the table, every stitch of whose green-and-red cross-stitched border is made visible, you could almost say celebrated, by the oversized print’s magnification—all this creates a gestalt that is far removed from that of the rueful Evans’s homage to the dirt-poor. As with all Struth’s photographs, it is hard to say what ‘statement’ it makes, but its note is characteristically cheering, even elating. The dazzling white cross-stitched tablecloth (to which the eye is drawn as if to a central figure) emblematizes the work’s optimism, like that of an Easter Sunday service—or an encounter with a friendly photographer.”
-Janet Malcolm, “Depth of Field”
