Andreas Gursky
Photographs the modern world from a height, at a size that makes the crowd legible one figure at a time.
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 into a family of commercial photographers and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher, alongside Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and Thomas Struth. The subject is the systems people live inside: stock exchange floors, the Rhine, a Prada shelf, a Pyongyang stadium, a container port, a 99 Cent store. The pictures are made from a raised, frontal viewpoint, printed very large, and since the early 1990s digitally combined from multiple exposures, so the whole surface stays in focus and the eye can move across it indefinitely without finding a centre.
Everything is editioned and the editions are small — often six, sometimes fewer, with artist's proofs — so the edition number and the print date are the identifying facts. The prints are typically chromogenic, face-mounted to acrylic and framed by the artist's specification, and that mounting is part of the work: it cannot be reversed, it scratches, and it is sensitive to light and heat. Several images exist in more than one size as distinct editions. Signature, number and date are usually on a label on the reverse of the frame.
If you own a work by Andreas Gursky
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