Financial Times

The Financial Times (FT) is an English-language international daily newspaper with a special emphasis on business and economic news.

The paper, published by Nikkei in London, was founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and Horatio Bottomley, and merged with its closest rival, the Financial News (which had been founded in 1884) in 1945.

The Financial Times has an average daily readership of 2.2 million people worldwide (PwC audited figures, November 2011). FT.com has 4.5 million registered users and over 285,000 digital subscribers, as well as 600,000 paying users. FT Chinese has more than 1.7 million registered users. The world editions of the Financial Times newspaper had a combined average daily circulation of 234,193 copies (88,000 for the UK edition), for January 2014. In February 2014 the world editions, combined, of the Financial Times sold 224,000 copies. In October 2013, the combined paid print and digital circulation of the Financial Times reached nearly 629,000 copies (282,000 for print and 387,000 for online sales), the highest circulation in its 125-year history.As of August 2014, print sales for the paper (all editions combined) stand at 210,182.

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (born 1954) is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs, family portraits and 1970s black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York. Struth currently lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Early life and education

Born to ceramic potter Gisela Struth and bank director Heinrich Struth in Geldern, Germany, Struth trained at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting under Peter Kleemann and, from 1974, Gerhard Richter. Increasingly drawn to photography and with Richter's support, Struth, along with Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Roswitha Ronkholz, joined the first year of the new photography class run by Bernd and Hilla Becher, in 1976. In 2007, he was an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

In 2007, Struth married author Tara Bray Smith in New York.

Work

In 1976, as part of a student exhibition at the Academy, Struth first showed a grid composed of 49 photographs taken from a centralized perspective on Düsseldorf’s deserted streets, each of them obeying a strict logic of central symmetry. The compositions are simple and the photographs are neither staged nor digitally manipulated in post-production. Strong contrasts of light and shade are also avoided, Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning. This serves to enhance the neutral treatment of the scenes.