Photos so complex 'you could look at them forever'

For 15 years, Thomas Struth has been practising the gentle martial art of tai chi chuan. In that time, his photography has moved provisionally inwards to address what he calls "some questions of the self". Only recently, even though, did he make a connection between his personal and his artistic journey.

More recently, although, Struth has been photographing another kind of jungle: the cluttered interiors of highly technological environments. These large photographs, which have titles just as Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery and Stellarator Wendelstein 7-x, are as complex as his jungles are calming or his before street scenes are austere. "For me," he says, smiling, "they are landscapes of the modern brain. There is this one-sided investment in research and science as the promised better future - the iPhone, the internet, cloud computing. It seems to me that there has been a dwindling of political thought and engagement as our thinking has become problematically entangled in these kinds of self-focused, endlessly repeating desires. In other words why I wanted these pictures to look somehow exhausting."