Gursky’s parents were both commercial photographers, but he ended up at the avant-garde Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, the famous art school that gave the world painters Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. Gursky studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose black-and-white, deadpan studies of vernacular architecture acquired so much gallery cachet in the 1970s that Akademie students eagerly adopted their teachers’ formula for pictorial success. Which was: pick a mundane but plentiful subject like buildings or portraits, and get all the details. What Gursky added to the mix was color, variety and a sheer wonder at all the stuff the modern world offers to our eyes. Gursky travels constantly to find his subjects, which are often dizzyingly complicated: a May Day celebration’s ravers, a Shanghai hotel atrium with never-ending balconies or multitudes at work on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Gursky can also be a deceptively simple artist. “Rhine” (1999) shows a patch of the great river as it flows by, about a quarter of a mile from Gursky’s home. He jogs by it every day, but it took him three years to form just the right image for a photograph in his mind. “There was to be no blue sky,” he says, “because then you would also have a blue surface on the water, which needs to be gray.” He also had to build scaffolding to get his cumbersome camera into just the right position.
Gursky has gradually insinuated digital doctoring into his pictures, going back and forth between an optical scanner and traditional film-and-chemicals to get a seamless mix. (He’s been known to modify a picture one pixel at a time.) The results vary. A composite image of two eerily minimal commercial-warehouse buildings in “Toys ‘R’ Us” (1999) is a powerful comment on the dehumanization of the built environment. But a huge fantasy on a great stockholders meeting in the sky–made just this year–sacrifices too much of what Gursky himself calls his “connection to the real world” to the computer.
MoMA curator Peter Galassi, organizer of the Gursky show, says, “One problem that photography has had is that everybody sees hundreds of photos every day, and we think we know how to look at them. In museums, the audience has been more responsive to little gray rectangles. People in photography have been wondering when everybody else was going to wake up to how wonderful [big color photography] is.” Well, not every imitator is as good as Gursky. There’s a current saying in photography circles: “If you can’t make it good, make it red, and if you can’t make it red, make it big.” Gursky makes them big, sometimes a bit red and almost always good.
