ANDREAS GURSKY
ANDREAS GURSKY
I’ve been thinking about Group f/64. If it still existed, would Andreas Gursky qualify? Group f/64, formed in the 1920s, included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke. As f/64, they opposed blurry pictorialism, preferring sharp focus and natural forms (untouched Western landscapes and sexy peppers). To qualify (I assume), members needed a camera that could stop down to f/64, which only large-format cameras can do. Fortunately, Gursky uses large-format Linhof cameras. Second, he’d need a Western landscape in his portfolio. Check. Is this enough?
Gursky was born in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1955. His family moved to Essen, West Germany in 1956. He trained in photography at the Dusseldorf School with photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, famous for their black-and-white typologies of water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and the like. “Dispassionate” is an oft-used word to describe the Bechers and also Gursky: distant, detached, impartial, rational, unemotional. Gursky’s work is, however, also influenced by American Abstract Expressionism, known for its strong emotional response, often due to its large scale and color. The New York School (American Abstract Expressionist artists in the 1950s and 1960s) included immigrant artists Willem de Kooning (from Holland), Arshile Gorky (from Armenia), and Mark Rothko (from Latvia). It’s easy to see Rothko’s influence in Gursky’s Review (2011). Although the New York School are a generation older than Gursky, I wonder if their shared European heritage makes a difference.
A problem (or not) with Gursky’s Review, and with all his photographs, is that they are simply not true. Review is a photograph that depicts four German chancellors, none of whom were ever together in the same room. The photograph is a digitally-manipulated composite.
Also, look at Gursky’s Amazon (2016), a warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona. The photograph blends fact, fiction, and landscape. Viewing this photograph on a smartphone is a completely different experience from viewing it in a gallery. Huge scale combine with tiny detail. The print is 87.5 by 160.25 inches. You have to stand back to take it all in. “Distance,” said Gursky “is…… something else I inherited from the Bechers. If a photojournalist was commissioned to document a scene, they would get much closer. But by always keeping a distance, I allow the viewer to come up with their own opinion. While my images are all comprised of many details – which you can explore in depth because of the high resolution – that’s not what they are about. Each one is always a world of its own, created.”
The purchase of a Gursky print will cost you millions. Gursky’s 99 Cent (1999) was sold, ironically, at Sotheby’s in 2007 for a record $3.34 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold at the time. Until 2011, when Gursky’s Rhein II sold at Christie’s for $4.39 million.
For good measure, I’m adding three more Gursky photographs, simply because I like them: Cathedral (2003), Paris, Montparnasse (1993), and Untitled XVIII (2015). People don’t feature often in Gursky photographs, except as background. Cathedral is an exception: one of those figures in the foreground in German filmmaker Wim Wenders.
Gursky photographs have symmetry, repetition, simplicity, high resolution, and color. They are also highly detailed, all-in-focus, manmade landscapes. And all are digitally manipulated. Does it matter that Amazon has no aisles for workers to walk along, that there are no pillars in Cathedral I (they were digitally removed), or that the apartment building in Paris, Montparnasse has an unusual camera perspective (it’s a composite of several)?
Gursky disturbs traditionalists, but he’s not concerned. This, he says, is our world: global, consumerist, anonymous, distant, tiny humans dwarfed by manmade landscapes. “This is also the truth,” he says, “I show our contemporary world the way it is.”
The old school, by which I infer Group f/64, might be startled by Gursky’s sophisticated manipulations. They were open to manipulation, but not to this extent. Would they receive Gursky’s “dispassion?” Would they admire his detail? Would they marvel at the size of his prints, which would never fit in a darkroom tray.
Gursky has his own version of Group f/64: he is part of the German School of Photographers, and the “Bild-Erfinder” or “Pictorial Fabricators.” The “Bild-Erfinder” construct new visual realities with digital manipulation. Members include Thomas Ruff, Laurentz Berges, Axel Hutte, and Gursky (all former Becher students). They share a studio (a converted electricity station) in Dusseldorf.Out with the old; in with the new: the same, and different.