Andreas Gursky F1 Pit Stop I 2007 Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin / London © Andreas Gursky / SODRAC 2009
The personal character of this project, which seems like a taking stock of his career up to now, is reflected in the function that small prints of big photographs have had for Gursky. He has kept small prints around him in his studio and at home since he began to work with digital post-production in the mid-1990s. He shoots on film with a five-by-seven camera and scans images into the computer in order to retouch, manipulate and build them as montage.
“If you do so much post-production,” he says, “it takes such a long time to finish a picture. Normally, I don’t have the distance after this process to get the right feeling: is it a good picture, an okay picture, or a bad picture? So I need the pictures around me to prove the quality of the picture.
“The best situation to be confronted with your work is to come into a room or a space, and you don’t think about approaching your work, you just come from another world and you see it and you have an immediate emotion. This is the original reason to have pictures in the small size, but then I found they attracted me in the same way as the big pictures.
“In a way, the reading of the pictures is the same. Even if it’s a really big picture, if you want to get the details, you have to approach the picture and you read the picture line by line, and the same if you read a very tiny picture. For in a way, the tiny picture could be a detail of the big picture, no?”
Gursky also says that after 25 years of working the same way, he feels a bit bored. “I don’t have many choices in producing my work, so I take the photograph but the final result is always this [C-print mounted on] Plexiglas and it’s framed. On the one hand, I am happy that I found a solution that works very well for presentation; but on the other hand, I wish I could work with different materials. I’m a bit jealous of painting, where you have surface and the smell of paint. In my case, it’s always the same. So maybe this is the background for at least trying to make a difference between the sizes.
“But on the other hand, you could say the frames, you know, they are always wood and it’s not so important. I think it’s a good sign if you see an exhibition and you can’t remember the presentation, the pictures stay in your mind. Then I think it’s not so bad.”
Gursky, it would seem, is foremost a picture maker. This retrospective makes apparent as never before the encyclopedic scope of his immense, nearly single-handed project. It emphasizes the ways in which pictures within the whole relate to one another, both metaphorically and compositionally, and the strong abstract qualities of the compositions of his representational works, which refer to other photography and art forms such as painting. After all, a photographer can make or construct—rather than simply take—photographs about modern life, and produce them on the scale of painting. This is an approach to the medium he saw in the work of Jeff Wall, whose exhibition “Transparencies” he attended in Germany in the mid-1980s. Around the same time, Kasper König invited Wall to speak at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, where Gursky was studying with Bernd and Hilla Becher.
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