The big time…
Andreas Gursky’s huge photos have made him the world’s most famous and financially successful art photographer. From afar, the rows of goods that fill this 2016 picture of the Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona, conjure the ghosts of 19th- and 20th-century art, be it pointillism or geometric abstraction.
Modern romantic…
It is also a kind of 21st-century Romanticism, wowing us with the immensity of both the image and the enterprise, the way JMW Turner or Caspar David Friedrich did.
Shock and awe…
Gursky is typically drawn to spectacular sites where tiny details, be it architecture, packaging or people, make up an overwhelming mass. He has also trained his camera on the stock exchange, raves, housing developments and Formula One.
Massive attack…
They might inspire awe, but the after-effect of such works is shock. What Gursky gets at are the unyielding, mindlessly cruel forces of global capitalism. In spite of the promise of individualism through consumerism, people are lost in the crowd, in a world of excess and waste.
