Hi, welcome back. I thought that it might be interesting to look at a highly successful landscape photographer. Perhaps it's better to refer to him as an urban landscape or interiors photographer.
I'm talking about the work of Andreas Gursky. He's a German photographer who until recently had the distinction of having the highest price paid for one of his photographs. This image, Rhine 2, sold at Christie's for $4.3 million in 2011. And it was only in 2022 that $12,400,000 was paid for a Man Ray.
Pyrrhus would say that he's not a straight photographer and that's true, in that he uses digital manipulation extensively. He's using the medium to question what the boundaries of photography are, how to expand what photography might be, and to question how we look at photographs. He mixes the real world with fiction by taking advantage of the fact that a photograph can give you both. His images are iconic on multiple levels. The process of taking the photographs is often technically complex and costly.
In exhibitions he enlarges his image sometimes up to six meters in length that's close to 20 feet. His subject matter is also grand. He's interested in how the world is put together in this age of globalization, how man-made structures and systems are arranged in order to cope with the demands of modern consumerism. Gursky's teachers at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf were the famous Berndt and Helle Bescher who spent their career documenting industrial structures across the Western world. They took thousands of images and divided them into categories based on function.
They sequenced the images by formal similarities. Their conceptual art encourages viewers to engage with the structural qualities of their subject matter. Gursky, like many other of their students, has drawn on these elements of formality and how the structures that we build reflect deeper human qualities. Repetition of detail and geometric shapes are some of the tools that Gursky's borrowed from the Bechers. They emphasize the conformity of society.
In 1990, Gursky was on a drive with his family sightseeing in and around Naples, Italy. He came across this view of the harbor of Salerno. He was overwhelmed by the scale of the site and the systems of operation.
The light was going so he quickly took four frames without really thinking through the complexity of the image, the accumulation of goods, the cars, the containers. He wasn't sure that the photograph was going to work in any way, he was just responding to intuition. It landed up being a pivotal image for him and it was the first time that he manipulated images to alter the actual meaning.
One could say that he has his roots in documentary photography, but his aims are aesthetic. He uses the basic image as a starting point and he takes the medium into its extremes, deleting, duplicating. and inserting elements as he pleases.
He uses digital post-production techniques to produce realities that actually don't exist. He works more like a painter who already has an idea of the final result in mind. This scene called Rhine 2 is not far from Düsseldorf where he lives.
As I mentioned earlier, it was sold for $4.3 million. He wanted to make a statement about the need of human beings to control nature. The perfectly straight lines do not occur naturally. They are the result of intricate post-production work.
He also edited out a power station that spoilt the composition. The horizontal lines are similar to those seen in this painting by abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman. Gursky created this image 99 Cent in 1999. It became part of a series of photographs on discount stores. The series quickly became recognized as one of his most important works and has been placed in major museums all around the world. Since then, this image has been mimicked many, many times.
He overpowers one with colour and detail. The image takes on an otherworldly feel because everything is in sharp focus and there are multiple points of interest. Someone's eye doesn't have a particular point on which to rest.
It's impossible for the viewer to take in the entire image or all the detail in one go. You can only focus on one part of the picture at any particular time. So this disrupts our understanding of the image and it causes, in me at least, a suffocating response. Within that feeling of claustrophobia one becomes almost sickened by the excesses of consumerism.
In this image called Montparnasse, created in 1993, Gursky took two shots from across the road at the time of the attack. parallel locations. The images were then stitched together to produce a uniformity within the structure that is actually real, but not something that could be achieved from a single shot. All the lines are perfectly straight and every window is the same size. So what he's capturing is actually true to the spirit of the building rather than letting it become distorted by optics.
The resulting picture is like a faded Mondrian painting. This block of flats with its 750 individual apartments seems to me like a horror show. When you view a large print of this image, one gets the idea that the occupants are living in a beehive. But then you can also focus in on the individual existences of the tenants.
In Paris Montparnasse, Gursky revisits an area that had inspired countless artists and literary characters in the 1920s and 30s. Some of those names include Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Hemingway, but here brings it up to date with an image that explores brutalist architecture from the post-war era. In this image you see the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her three predecessors sitting in an orderly row in front of a geometric abstract painting. This scene actually never happened, it's a complete fiction. He incorporated individual images that he had made of the chancellors and produced a type of dystopian view showing these powerful rulers creating the structures that impact German people.
This image is more recent, taken in 2017. He was on a road trip vacation with his wife and took a picture with his phone from a moving car window. He saw something in the shot that interested him and he returned later on with his camera equipment. He was interested in examining a contemporary challenge of modern photography, how the effortless, mass digital photography creates its own problems. In order to deal with the abundance of images, one has to decide what is worth keeping and what isn't. This photograph is also a contemporary take on the American tradition of photographing in the Western landscape.
But he wanted to create something painterly and at the same time include some of the glitches that come with mobile phone photography. While riding on a train in Tokyo, he saw this scene from the window. He returned with a large format camera and rode the same route 40 times.
He initially printed the images and roughly patched them together on his studio floor, much like a montage. Then he digitally stitched the final scene together. He has a knack for choosing subjects that have complexity and beauty.
But he also challenges the viewer to question whether the systems that we've created to manage our existence are altogether what we want. In this shot called Amazon Phoenix, Arizona, we're impacted by the supernatural clarity in which everything is in focus and laid out systematically. He took multiple images focusing on the different planes within the image.
When you look closely, you can see that each line has a seemingly disordered array of items. It's very different from the old Ford car plants. where each work bay added a single item to the car. He's pointing out that in this case the system is being built around barcodes, so they make perfect sense to computers but not to us.
If we want a world in which items can be delivered on the next day, then we have to let go of a number of individual controls. This idea of a system beyond our understanding is emphasized by the Soviet type slogans on the back wall. They have instructions, make history, work hard, have fun.
Even though he's been active in the world of contemporary photography since the 80s, he doesn't ever produce more than eight works per year. He plans each one in fine detail. He's obviously drawn to these scenes of overwhelming impact.
They depict a society that's chosen systems of operations that are not necessarily human friendly. They are geared towards production, consuming and maximizing profits. It could be a statement about rampant capitalism or Stalinist type dystopian empire, but he's not telling the viewer what to think. Rather, he leaves the scene open for us to engage personally with the subject. Each image that he creates becomes a world of its own.
They become metaphors for cultural attitudes. Viewers who become disturbed by these desensitized environments project their fear and fury onto the photographs. The choices of enemy vary from capitalism, communism, globalization, overpopulation, AI, the internet, and whichever government is in. power. I think I'll leave Gursky's claustrophobic world there.
I hope you enjoyed it and join me next time.