Andreas Gursky (born 1955) is a German photographer and professor and the Kinstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany which is the academy at which the Bechers’ taught him and influenced lots of art in the Minimalism movement. Gursky is known for large format architecture and landscape colour photographs (similar to the style in which Lewis Bush photographs in his Metropole project. Gursky studied at the Universitat Gesamthochschule Essen in visual communication, with classes led by photographers Otto Steinert and Michael Schmidt. Between 1981 and 1987 he attended the Dusseldorf Art Academy where he received training from Hilla and Bernd Becher which led to a similar methodical approach in his photography.
Gursky would not digitally manipulate his images before the 1990s however has begun to rely on computers to enhance his photographs. A lot of Gursky’s photographs are taken from a high vantage point which gives an unusual but effective perspective. He tends to focus on large man-made spaces such as offices and high rise buildings. The photographs are printed to create huge panoramic colour prints which can be up to six feet high by ten feet long. Critic Calvin Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of his works in person as having “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”.
Gursky’s photograph 99 Cent taken in 1999 was taken at a 99 Cents Only store in Los Angeles and shows the interior of the store as a wide composition of parallel shelves with a few white columns to separate up the photograph. The photograph represents all of the individual products as one wave of colour and blocky shapes rather than the brands and products on offer. The photograph supposedly depicts a stretch of the river Rhine outside Dusseldorf.
Andreas Gursky appeals to me because, similar to Bernd and Hila Bechers and Lewis Bush, he focuses on buildings and the patterns throughout them in order to create abstract and intriguing compositions. The photographs produced by Gursky often show the contrast and similarity between products and buildings through a typology approach without using a typology grid, for example in his photograph ‘99 Cents Gursky shows the contrasts and similarities between each of the products in the 99 Cents store. This is shown as the individual shapes of each product can be seen if you look closely but when looking at the photograph as a whole all of the products seem to be the same apart from the colour – the branding that the manufacturers pride themselves on are no longer important as all of the products blend together.
