New Pictures from Paradise was the generic title for an exhibition of the first 19 pictures in the series at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York in 1999. Struth sought a title that communicated that the pictures were not primarily focused on botany, nor some kind of elegy for a paradise lost. He was more interested in the kinds of observation, contemplation or experience that the works could stimulate and a melancholy reflection at the turn of the millennium as to what kind of utopian or progressive thinking might be possible after the end of the Cold War.

Whilst a small number of these pictures reprise the compositions of classical landscape paintings, with foregrounds, vistas and horizons, most of them position the viewer before a screen of forest or jungle that includes a plenitude of details of nature without offering any hierarchy or structure to the viewing experience. “Although they have a strong feeling of time, they are ahistorical. One sees a forest or a jungle but there is nothing to discover, no story to be told. They have more to do with the self. The viewing process is complicated, and the viewer becomes more aware of how he or she is processing the information, heightening an awareness of the here and now.”

At the same time Struth recognises that some of the photographs are informed by certain motifs and elements relating to a specific culture. Several of the works made in Yakushima in Japan foreground the growth of moss, stones and ancient trees and appear to reference the tradition of Japanese gardens. The photographs made in the rainforests of Peru and Brazil connect with the idea of an exuberant Latin American culture whilst the works made in the pine forests of Bavaria draw on the formative importance of the motif of the forest — "Der Deutsche Wald" — in German art and literature.