Andreas Gursky: ‘I Pursue One Goal – The Encyclopaedia of Life’

[Music] andreas gursky is to my mind one of the great artists of our generation he really grew out of an interest in a kind of expanded documentary type of photography in the 80s and he quickly developed it into something where the photograph was more a kind of metaphor for a cultural attitude about something and he said that he was interested in how the world is put together and a lot of his pictures show you this in a kind of detail and clarity that I don't think any other photographer has approached his early pictures with the majority of them are in and around Dusseldorf where he lives and then by the beginning of the 1990s he had gained a certain international stature he's been invited to do exhibitions in different parts of the world he starts taking pictures in very different places he started out working with film cameras and then he begins using digital post-production he is using it to get a different type of perspective that really never existed before where in a famous picture from 1993 called Paris Montparnasse in order to get an image where every window is the same size he put his camera across the street at two different locations so in andreas his picture every window was the same size it's utterly uniform and it's true to the spirit of the building rather than being distorted by optics and finally he reaches a point where he decides he will construct photographs completely so there's a wonderful picture that shows you the last four German Chancellor's sitting in what looks like a kind of glass enclosed sound booth but it's a situation that never happened in real life it's completely a fiction that andreas has created you get to the most recent pictures which were inspired by pictures he took on a mobile phone while traveling he then went back with proper equipment to try to recapture something that he saw that interested him in there pictures including some of the glitches so these pictures to me or his acknowledgment that we now live in a moment where the mobile phone photograph is this major cultural artifact of our time but that he can still produce something that's really complex and mesmerizing work of art at some point in the mid-90s he did start using large format digital cameras there's a wonderful image in the other room of Tokyo and this was one of the pictures he had taken originally with a phone and then went back rode the train 40 times shooting the same area over and over again and then patched together all those different pictures he'd made and when I went to visit him they were all laid out on the floor so there was an area about 5 by 3 meters with this collage of printed pictures that he was trying to work out rather than doing it on a computer so it's still an interesting mix for as digital as it's cut and there are these moments where you're just laying out pieces of paper on the floor and trying to see what works we're looking here at a picture from 2016 called Amazon which shows you this Amazon warehouse in Phoenix Arizona he'll take several different photographs of horizontal bands in order to make each area completely in focus and then you get this sense of an image that the human eye wouldn't register if you were standing there so there's a supernatural kind of clarity to it at the same time he's just showing you what's actually there so you know he's not tweaking the image to make something false he's tweaking it to make something that's closer to the truth and here is that seemingly disorderly array of objects because they're no longer organized by category they're just digitally coded as they come into the warehouse and I think he's very shrewd as a thinker about global culture to pinpoint this change as something that is a real key moment in how we order the world and I think from the beginning that has been his focus is how do we order the world around and how can photography reveal that to us entre us has a knack for picking subjects that really relate to key issues of our time but he leaves it very much open to the viewer to form their own opinion about what this might mean the images have a complexity and beauty to them that it's a very different kind of experience even if it's filled with trash he's made a beautiful image of it but it doesn't make you forget that the trash is there so he leaves the door open for politics to enter the room but he's not going to tell you what to think [Music]

Channel: Christie's

Views: 42,268

Keywords: Andreas Gursky, Hayward Gallery, German, photographer, London, Ralph Rugoff

Id: duJQMdSbsBw

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018