Andreas Gursky bestrides the art world like a colossus. For once in the contemporary art scene, form, content and price tag come together like a rare planetary alignment. The 51-year-old German photographer makes the best and most expensive photographs in the world, and he's just made some new ones that are being shown in Munich at the renovated Nazi museum Haus der Kunst.
I say "just." Many of these photographs have taken five or six years to capture. If only more of today's painters spent as many weeks on a work. But then most of today's paintings don't cost as much as a Gursky. His trademark pieces regularly sell for $1m, and this February his 99 Cents II, Diptychon fetched £1.7m at Sotheby's—the record for a photograph at auction. For once the hammer prices of Gurskies—as they are known—do not simply reflect the herd instincts of billionaires: Gursky makes photos that not only define an age, but embody a new theory of photography.
In the five years since Gursky's retrospectives at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, many have suggested that the artist will not be able to carry on doing the same thing for much longer. Yet here he is again, with his large format camera, big sexy views and enormous (usually 3-metre high) prints, and they still look marvellous. Among the new pictures is an aerial view of the racetrack in Bahrain. The tarmac of the course zigs and zags across the vertical picture format like the brushstrokes of a de Kooning. Another image is of a "cow-skyscraper," an extraordinary 15-storey cow shed—though one suspects that, in his usual fashion, Gursky has enlarged the scale of the image by Photoshopping in a couple of extra floors. It is through images like these that the photographer has built a library of definitive images of our globalised, hi-tech world.
What makes a Gursky so, well, Gursky? It's not usually the originality of his subject matter: he gets many of his ideas for images (the multi-storey cow shed, for example) from photos in magazines. Nor does the power of his work mainly stem, as most critics claim, from its painterly qualities, its undisguised allusions to classical and modernist painting. What's really important—and revolutionary—about it is the photographic aesthetic it embodies. Great photography contains within it a philosophical definition of the photograph. These definitions have tended to be based on an uncanny dichotomy. Cartier-Bresson spoke of the "decisive moment" of the photograph. With his lightning reflexes, he defined the aesthetic of the medium as the ability to freeze a transient moment forever. Roland Barthes wrote about the "punctum" of a photograph—the moment when the eye spots something surprising in a familiar scene, an aesthetic popular with photographers from the 1950s. Susan Sontag talked about the "indexical" quality of the photographic image, by which she meant the medium's unique but also flawed claim to show reality. That thought underpinned a generation of photographers, led by Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who staged their photographs like tableaux vivants, in order to reveal the hidden social and sexual codes in photographic images.
Gurksy has cottoned on to an entirely different dialectic in the photographic aesthetic—the disjuncture between the length of exposure and the scale of the subject, between the frame and the framed. In a way, it is the opposite of Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," in which an instant is captured for eternity. In Gursky's work, we have the sense of eternity being packed into an instant—of an enormous amount of information and space being presented in a single frame. This is why his photographs of a North Korean communist extravaganza surprise and dazzle, even though we have seen such images before. Here, in a hundredth of a second, the photographer has recorded an era forever.
Andreas Gursky's new exhibition runs at the Haus der Kunst. New works will be exhibited at the White Cube Gallery and Spruth Magers in London from late March
