Leipzig

Shot from a distance, the industrial cityscape nonetheless features even the most minute of details, thus appearing as an image of a macrocosm. Although a photograph of the artist's native city, 'Leipzig' bears no trace of nostalgic, romantic feeling and conveys the characteristic distance and objectivity of Gursky's work, a position he adopted from his professors at the State Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The horizontal composition of the work, leaving half the space to the sky, embues it with a feeling of calmness and tranquility that contrasts severly with the reality of the messy urban environment of the Eastern German city. Indeed the concentartion of cranes and others industrial elements in the middle-ground comes as a disruption to the silence of the foreground, in which an empty road seems to reflect the void of the sky in the background. In this no man's land, where technology adds an uncanny effect to nature, Gursky suspends the industrial action and makes the image speak through colours and composition. As in all of Gursky's works, 'Leipzig' stands half-way between a objective documentation and subjective delectation.