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Lot Essay
"I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world. I just record what I see." (Andreas Gursky in interview with Carol Squiers, "Concrete Reality" Ruhr Works September 1988, p. 29.)
The overwhelming impression of an impersonal almost mechanical objectivity that pervades all of Gursky's finest work owes much to the "distance" that Gursky manages to achieve in the way he photographs the reality of the world around him. It seems from Gursky's pictures, that it is not in fact the world itself that he is photographing, but the visual surface of contemporary reality. Gursky's work manages to achieve, through the mechanical medium of photography and the digitally manipulated image, a highly believable portrait of the innate artifice of reality, of its incredible myriad of detail and also its shallowness.
This sense of the artificial is achieved by the way in which Gursky's unique vision translates the details of life that come through his viewfinder into an abstraction. May Day III is a powerful example of this tendency in his art. The third work in a possibly ongoing series of photographs of crowds that Gursky has made, May Day III depicts the swell and rhythm of a collective humanity as if it were one hive-like mass of cells with only a collective identity. "I don't name the activities of the human figures specifically and hence do not question what they do in general." Gursky told Veit Gorner, " The camera's enormous distance from these figures means that they become de-individualized. So I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment." (Andreas Gursky -interview with Veit Gorner reproduced at www.postmedia.net.)
In this way Gursky shows us a picture of our world and of ourselves that is at once both unnerving and enlightening. His is a vision that once seen cannot easily be erased from the memory. Like scales falling from the eyes, the vast panorama and scale of Gursky's works only reinforces this overwhelming sense of reality being an abstract landscape through which we walk.
The overwhelming impression of an impersonal almost mechanical objectivity that pervades all of Gursky's finest work owes much to the "distance" that Gursky manages to achieve in the way he photographs the reality of the world around him. It seems from Gursky's pictures, that it is not in fact the world itself that he is photographing, but the visual surface of contemporary reality. Gursky's work manages to achieve, through the mechanical medium of photography and the digitally manipulated image, a highly believable portrait of the innate artifice of reality, of its incredible myriad of detail and also its shallowness.
This sense of the artificial is achieved by the way in which Gursky's unique vision translates the details of life that come through his viewfinder into an abstraction. May Day III is a powerful example of this tendency in his art. The third work in a possibly ongoing series of photographs of crowds that Gursky has made, May Day III depicts the swell and rhythm of a collective humanity as if it were one hive-like mass of cells with only a collective identity. "I don't name the activities of the human figures specifically and hence do not question what they do in general." Gursky told Veit Gorner, " The camera's enormous distance from these figures means that they become de-individualized. So I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment." (Andreas Gursky -interview with Veit Gorner reproduced at www.postmedia.net.)
In this way Gursky shows us a picture of our world and of ourselves that is at once both unnerving and enlightening. His is a vision that once seen cannot easily be erased from the memory. Like scales falling from the eyes, the vast panorama and scale of Gursky's works only reinforces this overwhelming sense of reality being an abstract landscape through which we walk.