On April 8th I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre to check out the Andreas Gursky exhibition that was running from the 25th of January until the 22nd of April. Being generally unfamiliar with Gursky's work but finding some of it of a certain appeal, I entered the exhibition with little in the way of expectations. The exhibition covered some four decades worth of work by Gursky, whose signature style is perhaps his monumental photographs: a distant viewpoint of large structures or crowds of people at massive size, teaming with detail and clarity. Incidentally, that last bit is the first thing I want to talk about.
One is essentially confronted by Gursky's photographs, which are often made by stitching many photographs together and other techniques to give them that signature clarity. Many of them invite and indeed reward a very close viewing, promising treasures of detail to be discovered. But this quickly becomes dizzying and a little overwhelming. Stepping back, one is disappointed (terrified perhaps?) to discover that the images do not resolve more sensibly than at close scale. The even crisp clarity so often employed by Gursky does away with a focal point, and so every piece of the image competes for one's attention at once. Looking over one image in particular, that of a crowd at a rave (May Day IV), I could not but help be reminded of the art of Geof Darrow. Darrow's consistent line weights and relentless detail mimic the way Gursky manipulates the lens. In both there is a flattening of the scene, the elements have been democratised and the viewer is disoriented and feels strangely removed. It's not a scene as viewed from a single vantage point, more an interpretation of such, or an integration of multiple views over time. That is especially evident in the rave scene, where throngs of revellers in different positions are captured with uncanny clarity, rather than being blurred or distorted. Of Gursky it can be said that his employ of the camera challenges the notion of the photograph as capturing simply a single moment in time. By abandoning a focus, the image encourages a wandering eye which surveys the scene as if it were real and the images thereby take on a quasi-temporal quality. Much the same could be said of Darrow's work, and indeed it is often the goal of the comic artist to convey a sense of time in a minimum of still images, so that at least in the comics medium, the idea of a single image as representing multiple moments in time, perhaps with time increasing in accordance with the reading of the scene, is not at all unusual.
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| May Day IV in person, for scale reference |
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| Andreas Gursky (2000) May Day IV [Source] |
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| Andreas Gursky (1999) 99 Cent |
While it might be tempting to think of Darrow as being influenced by Gursky, Gursky's more Darrow-eque works all come after drawings done by Darrow that caused me to think of a connection. I am curious to what extent Gursky has been influenced by the visual language of comics though, or whether this is a sort of parallel evolution in pursuit of similar ends.
Continuing the comic-book connection for me was Paris, Montparnasse where a massive apartment complex has been flattened, with perspective corrected out of the image to depict each unit as equally sized, each containing their own microcosmic world of human minutiae. It recalled to my mind the work of Chris Ware and other clear, diagrammatic comic art. In the language of comics, the apartment complexes would take on an association with the comic panel, thus able to convey a progression of time. While Gursky has gone to great pains to remove perspective from the image, when drawing it in the comic panel, a flat rendering would be one of the simpler solutions, while showing correct perspective for all of the apartments would be a herculean task. In Paris, Montparnasse Gursky is not so much compressing time as he is compressing space: multiple views have been summed up into one. In this way the image resembles a map, and indeed one would find it more useful for determining the position of one apartment to another than the unedited photograph.
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| Andreas Gursky (1993), Paris, Montparnasse [Source] |
Gursky has embraced digital and digital post-production and honestly this is to mixed results. Where he is distorting perspective and stitching images together the result is often a highly effective image, but some of his works, such as one depicting statues in a museum with many of them obviously composited in, simply look like bad experiments in compositing. Baffingly, one image inserts Iron Man and Pepper Potts from the Iron Man films into a tropical scene. Tacky and obviously photoshopped, the image looks like a portfolio piece from a concept artist at the beginning of his or her career. It's great that Gursky is experimenting, but I'm not sure such work merits inclusion in an exhibition. But I suppose one of the upsides of having a brand like Gursky is that everyone becomes interested in everything you do and imbues it with meaning beyond its merit.
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| Andreas Gursky (2005) Bahrain I |
I was quite impressed by Bahrain I, where Gursky has photographed a race track from an aerial perspective. Up close the image is filled with beautiful texture - the tread marks from the tires on the tarmac and the sandy dunes - while from afar the image takes on an elegant abstract quality, seemingly just an aesthetically pleasing example of graphic design. In a sense it is unclear what we are looking at, as the rules of perspective have been broken to fulfil Gursky's will of what the image should be. In the distance there is the horizon, but the track spills out as if viewed from above, not unlike how one might try to naively draw the scene if tasked with capturing as much of the track as possible.
One obvious but I think important takeaway for me was simply the size of the images. A photograph, particularly a digital one, is not so much an artefact as it is the potential for one, by displaying his images at massive scale, Gursky's photographs take on an undeniable presence and thereby a certain materiality. We are impressed, if by nothing else, by the amount of space these images consume.
