Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (born January 15, 1955, Leipzig, East Germany) is a German photographer known for his monumental digitally manipulated photographs that examine consumer culture and the busyness of contemporary life. His unique compositional strategies result in dramatic images that walk the line between representation and abstraction.

Gursky, the son and grandson of commercial photographers, grew up in Düsseldorf, West Germany. During the late 1970s he studied photography in Essen at the Folkwang Academy (now part of the multicampus Folkwang University of the Arts). He then became a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1981–87). There he started, like the majority of his peers, photographing in black and white with a handheld Leica camera, but he quickly went against trend and began working in colour with a larger 4 × 5-inch (10.2 × 12.7-cm) camera on a tripod. Despite his preference for working in colour, Gursky’s flat, dispassionate documentary style placed him squarely within the Düsseldorf school of photography, alongside Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth, all of whom studied under the Bechers. Gursky’s subject matter during the 1980s ranged from office-building security guards behind their desks to vast panoramas in which small figures engage in leisure activities to landscapes of the Ruhr River valley. Ratingen Swimming Pool (1987) shows a lush green landscape dotted with tiny figures swimming and relaxing by the pool. The scene was photographed from a considerable distance at a slightly elevated perspective. Though shot far from the pool, the image captures every element of the scene with extreme clarity and focus. Gursky’s thoroughgoing attention to detail in every part of the composition is a style for which he became known and celebrated.

By the late 1980s Gursky was producing photographs so large that they could be printed only in a commercial lab; within a few years he was printing on the largest photo paper available, and still later he was combining the largest single sheets to make his images even larger. Gursky was the first to produce prints that measured as large as 6 × 8 feet (1.8 × 2.4 metres) or larger. An example of that scale is his Paris, Montparnasse (1993)—a panoramic image of a large high-density apartment building that stands 7 feet high × 13 feet wide (about 2.1 × 4 metres). The head-on, slightly elevated perspective captures the building, some sky, and some ground, offering the viewer an entry point into the scene. However, by not including the side edges of the building within the frame of the photograph, Gursky made the structure look infinitely wide, with thousands of inhabitants living in close quarters but—with no visible interaction and the endless repetition of walls between apartments—seemingly isolated and alienated from one another. Paris, Montparnasse is an example of Gursky’s use of formal compositional strategies to comment on and construct narratives related to the realities of contemporary urban life.

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Paris, Montparnasse also exemplifies Gursky’s early attempts at digital manipulation, with which he began to experiment in 1992. His process involved shooting chromogenic prints (or “c-prints”) with film, using a large-format 5 × 7-inch (12.7 × 17.8-cm) camera; he scanned the images and digitally retouched and manipulated them on a computer. In Rhein II (1999)—which is 5 × 10 feet (about 1.5 × 3 metres)—Gursky created a nonexistent section of the Rhine River. By joining photographs of different segments of the river, Gursky invented an entirely new landscape, free of industry and human presence. Like a colour-field painting, the photograph is a composition of stunning colour and precise geometry. In 2011 Rhein II became the most expensive photograph sold at auction, going for more than $4.3 million. Perhaps his most-recognizable images are a group of aerial shots of whirling activity on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade (1999). Those images burst with colour, movement, and a striking amount of detail that covers every inch of the massive photograph. With its repetition of gestures and spots of intense colour, the lack of a distinct focal point, and the implication of the scene going on infinitely outside the frame of the photograph, Gursky achieved the effect of an all-over painting—a composition with no single focal point and in which paint reaches to all edges of the canvas—as in works from the late 1940s and early 1950s by Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. Gursky’s images of big concerts, such as Madonna I (2001) and Cocoon II (2008) are other examples of that effect. In order to achieve flatness and a compressed depth of field, Gursky sometimes employed helicopters or cranes that allowed him to shoot from above and thus to avoid a traditional one-point perspective.

Gursky also often manipulated colour in order to achieve a more organized or homogenous palette, such as in 99 Cent II Diptychon (2001), a dizzying diptych shot in a 99 Cents Only store. He manipulated the colour to create an explosion of repeating reds, yellows, and oranges dotted with blue, pink, white, and black. He also digitally inserted a reflection of the merchandise onto the ceiling, adding to the overwhelming visual effect and to the sensation of being surrounded by consumer culture gone mad.

In the mid-2000s Gursky often worked in Asia—chiefly in Japan, Thailand, North Korea, and China. His series Pyongyang, shot in 2007 in North Korea, documented the Arirang Festival—a sporadically held weeks-long annual event, named for a Korean folk song, that in 2007 involved 80,000 participants in highly choreographed gymnastic performances honouring the late founder of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung. Gursky photographed the festivities from an enormous distance, rendering the spectacle of tens of thousands of acrobats and performers a flat carpet of colour and frozen gestures.

In 2011 in Bangkok he created a series that captured the Chao Phraya River from above. His focus on reflection, currents, and the play of light and shadow on the flowing river resulted in images that look alternately like abstract paintings and satellite photographs. Gursky also returned to printing and exhibiting much smaller photographs as a way to experiment with perception and reception, as in the exhibition “Werke/Works 80–08” at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2009). Aside from wanting to be able to exhibit more works in less room, he had been exhibiting works on a monumental scale for nearly two decades and chose to introduce small prints again in order to understand the impact of scale on the viewer’s visual experience.

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Gursky fundamentally redefined photography for a new generation of artists. His unabashed use of digital manipulation forced into debate a new version of the age-old question of truth in photography, a discussion that began as early as the 1860s when it became apparent that the truth-recording capabilities of the camera could be manipulated, thereby distorting reality and eroding the viewer’s trust. Gursky’s approach pushed critics and artists to consider whether the question of truth, with the prevalence of digital photography and digital processing, was even relevant to the discussion anymore.