Profile: Andreas Gursky by Judith Bell
In a World of His Own

Times Square, 1997

Big, bold, seductive, surprising—the monumental photographs of Andreas Gursky capture the contemporary zeitgeist of a world transformed by high-tech industry, global markets, fast-paced tourism, big-time sports and slick commerce. From Tokyo to Chicago, Stockholm to Shanghai, the German photographer seeks out the signs of our times—vast hotel lobbies, apartment buildings, warehouses, sports championships, parliaments, international stock exchanges and massive techno-music raves. Photographing his subjects from great heights or vast distances, Gursky takes a God’s-eye view of humans overwhelmed by their environments.

A recent nationally touring mid-career overview organized by the Museum of Modern Art and assembled by chief curator of photography Peter Galassi, examined the singular quality of Gursky’s work that has made him one of the most accomplished and inventive artists of his generation. “There’s a theatrical element to Gursky’s work, and a glamour, which never hurts,” says Richard Flood, chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“There’s also a sense of looking at things with incredible precision and clarity. He has changed the way we see photography.”

That theatricality and glamour sees Gursky’s work coveted by the world’s major museums and purchased by such collectors as fashion designer Tom Ford and actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Priced at $75,000 and upwards, demand for Gursky’s images exceeds the artist’s output. The photographer produces photographs in editions of six and averages fewer than 10 images a year. In fact, much of Gursky’s work is pre-sold before it is even finished. That rarity has resulted in prices as high as $270,000 at a recent Christie’s auction.

	Autobahn, Mettmann, 1993

Like much of postmodern photog-raphy, Gursky’s work dispenses with the enduring myth that photography is about telling the truth. While seeming to document the real, these works record the workings of a personal fiction and the artful employment of computer-enhancing technology. In his towering image of a hotel in Shanghai, a seamless bending grid is created out of several frames of the same uninteresting interior shot from several different angles. The glowing amber color and minimalist perfection of the final image surpass the documentation of the uninspiring subject to create something totally fresh and riveting.

Andreas Gursky was born in 1955 in Leipzig and grew up in Düsseldorf. His father, a successful commercial photographer, introduced him to photography at an early age, and by high school he was fully familiar with the fundamentals of the trade. In the late 1970s, he studied at the Folkwang-schule in Essen, West Germany’s leading school of traditional photography. Influenced by the late Henri Cartier-Bresson, he first worked with a Leica, making snapshots on the street. During this time, German and American photographers like Michael Schmidt, Robert Adams and Nicholas Nixon abandoned their hand-held cameras for medium- and large-format cameras and tripods, a step that was not lost on Gursky.

Anonymous architecture was a fa-vorite subject of Gursky’s most famous teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. In the early 1960s, the pair documented gas tanks, cooling towers and other heavy industrial sites in Germany in black and white. Their work went largely unnoticed until the 1970s when their detached, restricted aesthetic caught on with a new generation of photographers interested in minimal and conceptual art.

	Ruhr Valley, 1989

Their rising currency in the art world won Bernd a professorship at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie in 1976. Artists like Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter had made the Kunstakademie the focal point of Germany’s postwar avant-garde. Gursky, along with photographers Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, studied with the Bechers in the 1980s as they shaped a new generation of artist-photographers and the art market in Germany began to boom.

While Gursky’s early style closely emulated that of the Bechers, he worked in color from the outset. An early series of sober uniformly composed images depicted security guards in the lobbies of office buildings. By 1984 he began to free himself somewhat from his mentors. Reverting to the more spontaneous approach he had pursued at the Folkwangschule, he made a series of pictures of hikers, swimmers, tourists and other leisure groups. The Becher influence remained in the consistency of pictorial type. Gursky began to prefer and then adhered to a broad picture plane populated by tiny figures surveyed by a godlike eye that is at once everywhere and nowhere.

By the late 1980s, Gursky’s hikers and tourists dwindled in number to one or just a few, focusing on the solitary being. Pictures like Ruhr Valley, 1989, (page 40) in which a lone figure is dwarfed by his surroundings, recall the emotional landscapes of the 19th century German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich, and the crisp focus of cheap picture postcards. This hybrid of high and low that taps into and resonates with the reservoir of images we all carry in our heads.

Gursky’s work took a decisive turn in 1990 when, on a trip to Japan for a group exhibition, he made a photograph of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (this page). The picture was modeled in part on a newspaper photograph Gursky saw in Dusseldorf before leaving for Tokyo. His brief work as a commercial photographer, during which he absorbed the particular visual vocabulary of the medium, also came into play.

	Rhine II, 1999

This blended style—part conceptual, part advertising gloss, part historical painting—developed rapidly after 1991. He traveled widely in search of up-to-date subjects—largescale office and apartment buildings, trading floors, airports—places where the anonymous individual is overwhelmed by the impersonal environment, becoming one among the faceless many.

Gursky’s collective portrait of globalization, a realm of abundant goods, ubiquitous brand names, massive gatherings, and sparkling surfaces, is distinguished by the vividness with which he distills inventive and engaging pictures from our commercialized image-driven world. Times Square, 1997, (page 40) presents the atrium of the Marriott Marquis Hotel as both an object of minimalist beauty and a garish product of popular culture. Part response to place and part elaborate invention, the picture was composed in the computer from two views made from opposite sides of the atrium. The six-story bridges seen on either side of the picture frame are actually the same structure morphed to run parallel in the photographer’s line of sight, once at his left, once at his right.

Preferring crowds to the individual, which become, as New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman writes: “blurs of color and form, the forms sweeping across the photographs like brushed fur. They are interchangeable with piles of pastel cargo containers at a dock in Salerno, or the multicolored windows of a vast apartment complex at Montparnasse, or Nikes lined up like trophies on digitally enhanced shelves with a digitally invented reflection below them—shoes that, contrary to all reasoned thought, look as desirable and otherworldly as anything you might imagine the second you see them. The images all draw you close in, the way you get drawn to the surface of an intricate painting, to take in the details and increase the ravishment.”

Paris, Montparnasse, 1993

During the 1990s, Gursky was also strongly influenced by the work of conceptualist painter Gerhard Richter, whose multi-disciplinary ventures included photography. Gursky’s photographs of paintings by Jackson Pollock and John Constable and an image of an all-gray carpet clearly allude to Richter’s work. The latter work, “Untitled I, 1993,” a photograph of the gallery floor of the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, is a radically empty picture, describing nothing more than the carpet and the space it defines, and recalls the monochrome gray paintings Richter made in the late 1960s.

In his most recent work, Gursky ventures further into digital technology to create totally artificial visual environments. Inspired by a magazine photograph of German company directors addressing a stockholders’ meeting, Gursky photographed 30 such meetings, combining the pictures of the directors into Stockholders Meeting 2001, an imaginary assembly addressed by numerous boards simultaneously. The executive view from the digital dais is part game-show host, part royal court in this commentary on corporate power.

Exhibition curator Peter Galassi refers to Gursky’s collective vision of sources and mixture of ideas writ large as “Gursky’s world.” Galassi writes: “Documentary realism versus digital manipulation, modernist idealism versus postmodern skepticism, high art versus commerce, conceptual rigor versus spontaneous observation, photography versus painting. These and other antagonisms have engendered some fierce battles, but for Gursky they are all givens—not opponents but companions.” Gursky’s visual experimentation and responsiveness to popular and artistic imagery make for a compelling engagement with the here and now. As Galassi states, “It is Gursky’s fiction, but it is our world.”

Judith Bell is an art historian and critic based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in American Photo, Art & Antiques, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and Omni, among others.