Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present

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Summary: Exploring The Limits Of Photographic Representationalism
Review: Andreas Gursky: Photographs From 1984 To The Present offers a grand, hugely diverse collection of larger than life images which taken as a whole conveys a gently ironic commentary of modernity in all its disparate manifestations. Although profoundly concerned with the role (and fate!) of man in the dis-articulated social tableau created by late-stage hyper-capitalism, Gursky is not making judgments about what he observes. To Quote from one of three introductory essays, this one written by Marie Luise Syring, "Gursky's work...reflects both the art forms and the everyday aesthetics of 20th-century society without resorting to open polemics-his images display too much indifference and beauty."

I was initially drawn to this series of photographs by the dust jacket illustration which is a somewhat unusual composition for Gursky, it turns out. I was touched immediately by the sparse, geometrically pleasing landscape running on endlessly in a striated banner of perfectly matched colour. There are several other 'naturalistic' studies included in this portfolio of 76 plates but most of the work examines the controlled chaos of urban settings, often featuring countless humans perambulating pointlessly in endless motion. "Being modern can also involve the danger of losing one's individuality and right to self-determination," Marie Luise Syring reminds us.

Gursky works on the boundary between painting and art photography. He tests and retests the critical distinctions seemingly inherent to these two representational domains. Thus many, but not all, of Gursky's photographs seem to have an explicitly clinical orientation. He is probing a fragile boundary and we know it. The cold truth which emanates from a stark objectification of the subject matter which compels Gursky is however always balanced by the way in which he floods his overrun visual fields with light and riotous colour. That I might personally prefer the warmer emotional tones of his naturalistic work to the harsher elements of the cityscapes is of course hardly the point. All of his work makes you think! And sometimes gasp at the sheer excess of talent and technique which propels the creation of such intensely intelligent, beautiful art.

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Summary: MOMA exhibit
Review: I saw this exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in NY recently and it was incredible. I'm usually not a fan of giant color photo exhibits, but this one really struck me. The complexity and beauty in his photographs will hit on something that you have most likely never seen. He has a gift of bringing common scenes like the supermarket into view in a way that makes you doubt you have ever shopped at one. If so, you would say, how did I miss that which is shown in this photograph? Looking at his photographs will bring on that same sense of smallness as pondering your little place on this little, common blue/green planet, around this one star that is the norm among billions upon billions.