Andreas Gursky started out shooting mostly black and white landscapes on a handheld camera, but in the 1990s he switched, taking the pictures that he has now become famous for. Out went analogue and in came epic panoramas that were digitally stitched together, capturing in intricate detail and colour stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, 99 cent stores, Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna concert.
“My works,” he recalls, “were selling for more and more.” In fact, his rising status in the art world was reflected in his photographs inside Prada and Gucci stores – the former was taken while he was waiting for his wife, who was shopping there. Then, in 2011, Gursky’s 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (£2.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. “How do you deal with a thing like that?” he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d’Ingres, which went for $12.4 million.
Gursky’s huge works are incredibly complex, often taking several years to complete. On average, he finishes three a year. He makes them by taking a series of pictures, sometimes at different locations, then suturing the parts he feels fit together into one single, impossible image. Given their ambition, their complexity and their scale, Gursky’s pictures have been likened to paintings. The scale is crucial: “They’re really done as big as I can,” he says. “You can’t get bigger technically.” People may not realise how much effort goes into making them – does that bother him? He shrugs.
We are speaking via Zoom but a week later we meet at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London, where he is installing his new exhibition. There is an entourage of technicians and assistants buzzing around. Although the exhibition includes just 16 pieces, Gursky says: “I don’t think I’ve ever presented such different types of work.”
It was all planned this way, though. The show features Gas Cooker, one of his earliest works. Dating from 1980, the shot gives a slightly elevated view of the hob at his student flatshare, its three rings eerily illuminated. Another image shows German activists in trees protesting against the destruction of a village, their sign in German saying: “The view from here is shit.”
There’s a new, melancholic image of a glowing steel ingot, a swansong to the Rhine’s precarious steel industry. And then there’s one of Gursky’s first iPhone pictures, a playful diptych of his wife at home adding a block to a tower of Jenga, with a box on her head. In short, this show reveals other sides to the German artist, more tender, intimate and spontaneous – quite a contrast to the distant observer, the mass-scale creator.
A few months ago, he called gallerist Jay Joplin and asked to postpone the show. “He said, ‘No way, no deal – I’ve given you the best date in the whole year. You have to cope and get it done.’” So he made 10 new pictures for the show. “That’s a lot for the way I work.”
For someone who has spent most of his career meticulously constructing images that couldn’t exist, Gursky, now 70, seems to take delight in the simplicity of the iPhone. The exhibition includes several smaller-scale, more diaristic snapshots, from a newborn family member to a folded towel fallen into a bath. Shot from above, the towel seems suspended in space, with bubbles of water around its still folded form. Get up close and you can see the pixels fuzzing at the edges.
It sounds like the kind of thing only a hugely famous artist could get away with. But it underlines what Gursky has always been interested in: how we see the world in photographic fragments. “The towel fell into the bathtub by mistake,” he says. “Underwater, it looked like magical realism. I just loved the way it looked. I was under huge pressure to create for the exhibition, then an image fell into my lap. I pressed click and there it was.”
The towel appears next to another new image: a remake of a quintessential work made in 1993. He says the new shot is better. It depicts an apartment building with 1,122 windows in Paris. The new version consists of several pictures taken in winter, meaning the sun wasn’t too glaring and the curtains were mostly open, allowing dozens of tiny vignettes into people’s lives. As you move closer, more and more details emerge – you could spend hours looking at it. But move back and it’s a gorgeously rich abstract expressionist piece, a composition of squares, from black to pastel-coloured.
“It’s about the inner life of the building,” he says. “It’s a panopticon of habits, tastes, and how people like to furnish their flats.” It’s also a paradox of an image – the picture gives a view of almost the whole building, which would be impossible to see in reality. It is the result of a series of photographs of segments of the building, shot from the hotel opposite then spliced together.
Side by side, the two pictures show how far-ranging Gursky’s interests and influences are. Another new work is sure to cause a bit of excitement: a picture of a famous English pop star. He won’t reveal who, although they met through Joplin. The musician was a fan of Gursky while the photographer, in turn, had “never heard of him”. Still, they became friends and Gursky accompanied the star on tour. The picture is taken from behind the musician as he performs in a glittering Gucci ensemble. Beyond is the stadium crowd, a sea of shimmering, cheering, screaming faces and iPhones. Gursky once asked Angela Merkel if he could shoot an image from a similar vantage point but the former German chancellor refused. “I guess,” he says, “it wasn’t a very charming offer – to photograph her from behind.”
When we speak via Zoom, Gursky remembers an evening he spent in the pub with his then fellow student Thomas Ruff, when both were at the fabled Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. A respected German art dealer walked up to them and declared: “You guys are going to be famous!” Gursky says: “At the time, I couldn’t have imagined I would become an artist and that I would exclusively devote my life to photography.”
Gursky speaks from his vast, bright studio in Düsseldorf, where he has been based since those 1980s student days. He shares the building, a former electricity factory, with Ruff, as well as artists Laurenz Berges and Axel Hütte. The building has been transformed over the decades they’ve been there by architects Herzog & de Meuron, who designed Tate Modern in London. There’s now a gallery there that houses some of Gursky’s art collection. “It’s mostly German artists from the Rhineland area,” he says.
Gursky is one of the world’s most feted photographic artists. You could almost say his success seems preordained: his grandfather Hans and his father Willy were both successful commercial photographers who trained him in the techniques of advertising photography from a young age. When he got to art school, he says, “I have to admit there were advantages. I was very familiar with the technique – but it was also an enormous disadvantage, as I was shaped by the aesthetics of advertising photography. I had to lose that along the way, somehow.”
At the Kunstakademie, he studied under Bernd Becher, one half of the hugely influential husband and wife duo credited with kickstarting the Düsseldorf school of photography – the biggest art movement in Germany since Bauhaus. The Bechers encouraged their students to bring a detached, dispassionate perspective to documentary photography; a bleak view of postwar Germany’s faltering industrial landscapes and architecture.
“We worked at their place,” he recalls. “There were only six of us in the class, so it was very intimate and intense.” They taught Gursky and his cohorts “how to see – and you do that best if you concentrate on one subject in depth”. His time with the Bechers “led decisively to me deciding to become an artist – just seeing the way the two of them worked and what could be done with photography.”
The White Cube exhibition is a testament to Gursky’s very particular way of seeing: seismographic, at times deadpan, and never short of awe. In a world flooded with thoughtless photographs quickly forgotten, everything hanging in this gallery was made for a reason. “Content plays a big role,” he says. “But it’s only after I have taken a photograph that I really discover what an image is about. I ask myself, ‘Is it relevant for society – or is it just formalism?’” And if it’s the latter, what does he do? “Then I delete it,” he says.
