Andreas Gursky: Making Things Clear

Art in America, June, 2001 by Edward Leffingwell

In a traveling exhibition that debuted at MOMA, Gursky's huge, often digitally manipulated photographs reveal his consistent interest in massed details of forms and movement seen from afar.

Andreas Gursky's Stockholder Meeting, Diptych (2001) is the product of a complex and labor-intensive process. Two large panels of digitally convened figures represent some of Germany's largest corporations at an annual meeting that could never be, with a rapt and ghostly audience that fans out in seats ranked along the diptych's base. Their lines of sight lead upward to a disconcerting central mass of snow-encrusted granite. Assembled groups of corporate leaders seated at long tables are ranged above the audience as though set into the mountain or suspended in surrealistic space. This high-concept effort was the final entry in a midcareer retrospective of the Dusseldorf-based photographer, organized by Peter Galassi for the Museum of Modern Art. The show was a welcome sign for the present and future department of photography as the museum resumed its curatorial engagement with the contemporary, realm following its two-year cycle of collection-based shows [see A.i.A., May `01].

In Gursky's digitally composed Valhalla, a few of those assembled confer with one another, while others puzzle at their podiums, waiting for some corporate benediction so the business of their convention might begin. Their names appear before them on plaques. A cheerless row of decorative geraniums extends along the base of one section, and ferns along another. Corporate logos hover like Pentecostal tongues in a cloudless sky above.

It was widely known that Gursky had been occupied for months with the logistics of producing this final entry. Ample buzz forecast that some sort of ambitious picture dealing with the convergence of economic power might appear in time for the exhibition. Its inclusion was contingent on Gursky's ability to complete the photography and the digital labors that would follow, liberate the panels from the laboratory in Germany, and get them mounted, framed and shipped on time.(1) Although the eventuality was perhaps never very much in doubt for those with confidence in Gursky's determination, this diptych became prematurely freighted with the burden of representing the artist at his highest pitch: a genius loose in the halls of corporate titans, capturing and revealing the very face of power.

In the polyglot hubbub that was part of the experience of repeated visits to the galleries, viewers stopped to figure out this work. Some seemed uncomfortable with the technology that had helped to create this cut-and-pasted Rushmore, voicing uncertainty about its implications. They drew close to examine the details, and they jockeyed for viewing distance to grasp the whole of the two panels, each roughly 6 by 8 1/2 feet. (Gursky's works are large, as much as 16 feet in length and 8 or so feet high, but not "billboard" size, a recurrent hyperbolic description.) Like the other works in the show, these are chromogenic color prints with generous white margins of about 6 inches that impart the commanding presence of an object; they are laminated to Plexiglas and finished with simple wooden frames.

Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 and raised in Dusseldorf, the son of professional advertising photographers Willy and Rosemarie Gursky and grandson of a portrait photographer, Hans Gursky. In 1977 he entered the Folkwangschule, Essen, the preeminent German school of photography. During a visit to New York in 1978, Gursky met the photographer Thomas Struth, a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers are well known for their series of sharp-focus, black-and-white photographs involving rigorous pursuit of single categories of architectural subjects. Two years later, Gursky joined the small group of Becher students--consisting of Thomas Ruff, Tata Ronkholz, Candida Hofer and Petra Wunderlich--at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie. The Bechers introduced him to the color work of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, U.S. photographers at the vanguard of the revival of the view camera. At the academy, he came to enjoy the support of curator and art historian Kasper Konig (now director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne), who introduced him to left Wall and Dan Graham. Not following the Becher model, Gursky immediately began to work in color, favoring single iconic images.

Since 1987, Gursky has tended to shoot with a 4-by-5-inch or 5-by-7-inch view camera in the interests of clarity of focus and sharpness of detail. While he is known for his large images, one of the earliest works in the exhibition, the 1984 alpine landscape Klausenpass, is a relatively modest 36 by 32 inches or so, framed.(2) As Galassi relates the story of its making, Gursky, while traveling, had set aside his view camera for a more portable medium-format camera (producing a negative of 2 1/2 by 2 3/4 inches) that would still accommodate his interest in detail. He snapped the view at the request of his companions. Enlarging the image six months later, he discovered a dozen minuscule figures trekking along the slope of the pitched and craggy scene, the scattered figures enlivening the view and adding depth to the image.(3) The first plate in the show's catalogue, Klausenpass represents an incidental photographic moment that seems pivotal in Gursky's development: Olympian in its detached observation of the setting and the stilled activity found in its details, this strangely populated landscape presages the preoccupations of a number of the photographs to come.