Young People's Academy · Web viewAndreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) is a photographer best known for his colourful, bold, large-format depictions of contemporary life. Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) is a photographer best known for his colourful, bold, large-format depictions of contemporary life. Andreas Gursky is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.During his years at the academy,  Gursky was heavily influenced by the conceptual aesthetic philosophy of the Bechers, as well as his fellow students Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

Gursky was born in Leipzig, East Germany in 1955. His family relocated to West Germany, moving to Essen and then Düsseldorf by the end of 1957. From 1978 to 1981, he attended the Universität Gesamthochschule Essen, where he studied visual communication, led by photographers Otto Steinert and Michael Schmidt.Gursky is said to have attended the university to hear Otto Steinert, however Steinert died in 1978 and Gursky only got to attend a few of his lectures. Gursky shares a studio with Laurenz Berges, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte on the Hansaallee, in Düsseldorf. The building, a former electricity station, was transformed into an artist’s studio and living quarters, in 2001, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame. In 2010–11, the architects worked again on the building, designing a gallery in the basement

Between 1981 and 1987 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Gursky received critical training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloguing industrial machinery and architecture. Gursky demonstrates a similarly methodical approach in his own larger-scale photography. Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies, whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld. The German photographer Andreas Gursky takes pictures of enormous spaces—stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks—in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment—architectural, technological, and personal—on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy.

Taken as a whole, Gursky's work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilized world. Gursky uses 100 ASA Fuji film in two large-format Linhof cameras that are positioned side by side, one with a slight wide-angle lens, the other with a standard one. Exposure time: 1/8 of a second, f-stop 5.6 to 8. He needs this for depth of field, and the relatively low-speed film for the resolution. Gursky was the first to produce prints that measured as large as 6 × 8 feet (1.8 × 2.4 metres) or larger. ... 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. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often using a high point of view in most of his photos. His works reach some of the highest prices in the art market among living photographers. His photograph Rhein II was sold for $4,338,500 on 8 November 2011

Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images.  In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable." In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school.

The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky...I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance.

The perspective in many of Gursky's photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach, This sweeping perspective has been linked to an engagement with globalization. Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art described the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky's style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.

Gursky's Dance Valley festival photograph, taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Trance, as its symmetry and simplicity echoes his own work—while playing towards a deeper, more visceral emotion

The photograph 99 Cent (1999) was taken at a 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and depicts its interior as a stretched horizontal composition of parallel shelves, intersected by vertical white columns, in which the abundance of "neatly labelled packets are transformed into fields of colour, generated by endless arrays of identical products, reflecting off the shiny ceiling" (Wyatt Mason). Rhein II (1999), depicts a stretch of the river Rhine outside Düsseldorf, immediately legible as a view of a straight stretch of water, but also as an abstract configuration of horizontal bands of colour of varying widths. In his six-part series Ocean I-VI (2009–2010), Gursky used high-definition satellite photographs which he augmented from various picture sources on the Internet.

Most of Gursky's photographs come in editions of six with two artist's proofs.

Since 2010, Gursky has been represented by Gagosian Gallery. As of end 2011, he holds a current record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print Rhein II sold for US$4,338,500 at Christie's, New York on 8 November 2011. In 2013, Chicago Board of Trade III (1999–2009) sold for 2.2 million pounds, an auction record for a Gursky exchange photo.

99 Cent II Diptychon

Artist

Andreas Gursky

Year

2001

Type

Photograph

Medium

C-print mounted to acrylic glass

Dimensions

207 cm × 307 cm (81 in × 121 in)

Rhein II

Artist

Andreas Gursky

Year

1999

Type

Photograph

Medium

C-print mounted to acrylic glass

Dimensions

190 cm × 360 cm (73 in × 143 in); [1]

Owner

Anonymous

Chicago, Board of Trade II was produced in an edition of six. Tate owns one of two artist’s proofs of the image. This large colour photograph depicts the trading floor of the Board of Trade in Chicago. Seen from above, the floor is a dense hive of activity. Brokers in brightly coloured jackets stand in groups around banks of monitors. Their flurried actions give the image a blurred quality; Gursky double exposed several sections of the image to enhance this sense of movement. Around the edges of the pit rise banks of desks, behind which are seated rows of figures hunched over telephones, staring at screens or gesticulating to their colleagues.

Gursky’s process often involves taking several pictures of a subject and scanning the resultant images into a computer where he can merge and manipulate them. His aim in using digital technology is not to create fictions but rather to heighten the image of something that exists in the world. He has said, ‘Since 1992 I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing, so as to emphasise formal elements that will enhance the picture, or, for example, to apply a picture concept that in real terms of perspective would be impossible to realise’ (quoted in ‘... I generally let things develop slowly’, Andreas Gursky: Fotografien 1994-1998, p.viii). By enhancing certain elements, he preserves the impression of something he has seen.

Parliament 1998 is a vertically oriented colour photograph by the German artist Andreas Gursky that is nearly two and a half metres tall and more than a metre and a half wide. Taken from an elevated perspective and seemingly through a window, the photograph depicts the assembly hall of the German parliament (Bundestag) in Bonn. The gridded pattern of the window frames through which the scene is captured divides the composition into four horizontal bands. In the bottom two sections of the image, groups of politicians can be seen standing on the floor of the hall and among its curving rows of desks with their bright blue seats. The upper two sections of the scene feature a public gallery overlooking the hall and, at the very top of the composition, a reflection of the scene below in which the floor, desk and blue seating areas are inverted. Although the photograph is of a very high resolution, blurring and refraction are evident in places throughout (especially in its lowest section) and the fragmented impression created by the window bars is heightened by Gursky’s digital manipulation of the image. For instance, in the centre of the work, one rectangular area of the public gallery appears to have been overlaid onto a separate image of the interior, as is suggested by the differences in colour and the number of people sitting on its benches. Furthermore, it is difficult to see what might be the cause of the inverted or reflected section at the top of the photograph, which suggests that it has been added by Gursky digitally. Tate’s copy of Parliament is one of an edition of six.

Bahrain I 2005 is a very large portrait format colour photograph by the German artist Andreas Gursky of the Bahrain International Circuit, a motorsport race track completed in 2004 that hosts the country’s annual Formula One Grand Prix. Taken from a helicopter and subsequently manipulated using digital software, the photograph shows the track curving in a snake-like fashion through the desert landscape, the black asphalt forming a strong contrast with the beige sand surrounding it. No cars or people are visible in the image, although a long horizontal grandstand with a white roof can be seen just above the centre of the composition. A cluster of distant buildings are also perceptible near the horizon underneath a hazy grey-blue sky. Tate’s copy is number one in an edition of six (plus an artist’s proof).

This work is related to another image of the same race track made by Gursky, Bahrain II 2007 (reproduced in Gagosian Gallery 2010, vol.2, p.27), which provides a closer aerial view of just three elements of the circuit. The images of the Bahrain track were created by Gursky while he was working on a larger series inspired by motor racing, F1 Boxenstopp (F1 Pit Stop), completed in 2007, which features panoramic images of Formula One cars and their colourfully-suited support teams taken at races around the world.

Gursky, whose father and grandfather were also photographers, was trained between 1981 and 1987 at the Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, the city where he continues to live and work. During his studies he was taught by the German photographers Bernd (Bernhard) Becher (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (born 1934). The objective and systematic approach to photographing industrial structures that the Bechers emphasised in their own work (see, for example, Coal Bunkers 1974, Tate T01923) proved highly influential on Gursky and a wider group of photographers at the Arts Academy, including Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, who studied alongside Gursky, and Thomas Struth and Axel Hütte, who completed their studies there in 1980. These photographers have become known collectively as the Düsseldorf School of Photography. Discussing Bahrain II, Gursky has claimed, ‘in terms of composition it comes from the influence of Hilla and Bernd Becher: it has a central perspective and it is photographed from an elevated position – and this is the way that I often approach my subjects’ (quoted in Lane 2009, p.36).

The curvilinear pattern created by the race track and the almost two-tone colouring of Bahrain I draws attention to the formal and compositional choices Gursky made to produce an image that appears almost abstract. As curator Fiona Bradley observed in 1995, Gursky’s images ‘seem first of all to make patterns which speak some universal language or visual or pictorial structures which we have lodged in our minds. Looking at them is an activity of recognising, or perhaps misrecognising, these structures’ (Fiona Bradley, ‘Introduction’, in Andreas Gursky: Images, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool, London 1995, p.10).

Gursky began to digitally alter his photographs in 1991; initially using computers as a tool for retouching images (Restaurant, St. Moritz 1991 was the first work altered in this way), he later used digital technology to combine multiples shots in one image. From the 1990s onwards, after focusing his attention on photographing places in Germany and neighbouring countries, Gursky began to take photographs of locations from around the world and started to print his images on a larger scale. His work has often examined the relationship between humans and their surroundings, particularly in the context of changes brought about by globalisation. The subject of Bahrain I exemplifies this concern in that it highlights the way in which an otherwise lifeless desert landscape has been expensively reshaped to accommodate an affluent, itinerant market. Many of the artist’s photographs adopt a similar bird’s-eye view to that employed in Bahrain I, and depict a small number of people who appear to be dwarfed either by massive natural features (such as mountains) or, more commonly, huge man-made constructions (such as bridges, apartment buildings or industrial sites). In his subsequent work, such as the 2010 Ocean series, Gursky has begun to work with satellite images, which offer an even wider perspective on the landscape.

Andreas Gursky 

ORIGINAL TITLE

Theben, West

MEDIUM

Photograph, colour, on paper on Perspex

DIMENSIONS

Support: 2020 × 1650 mmimage: 1677 × 1318 mmframe: 2075 × 1704 × 50 mm

Gursky uses a bird's-eye view to portray the collective behaviour of large social groups. His compositions illuminate the complex inter-relationship between man and his immediate environment. Landscapes often bear the traces of human activity, and yet our movements and actions are themselves determined by our physical surroundings. In this image, past and present are intertwined as modern-day tourists explore the archeological site of ancient Thebes, in Egypt. The landscape is revealed layer by layer, to show history extending its reach into the present.