{"id":7035,"date":"2018-05-14T23:02:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T22:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=7035"},"modified":"2018-05-14T23:02:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T22:02:41","slug":"gursky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/gursky\/","title":{"rendered":"Gursky"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/A><\/p>\n

In 2011 a record price was set for the sale of a photograph. Rhein II by Andreas Gursky was sold at Christie\u2019s for $4.3m. It was the then highest price paid for a photograph (and likely remains so<\/A>). Compared to the Leonardo da Vinci Salvador Munci painting that was sold for $450m last year, that\u2019s a relatively modest price. But photo sales are more interesting. <\/p>\n

First of all, there\u2019s the fact that they\u2019re largely reproducible. While a painting is one of a kind, a photographer can make as many, or as few, prints as they choose. A photo might be sold in editions of as few as 1 or as many as several thousand. <\/p>\n

Gursky reportedly sells in editions of six, with two artist proofs. Without any attribution displayed elsewhere in the recent Hayward Gallery exhibition, I assume that the exhibits in the Gursky exhibition currently nearing the end of its run at the reopened Hayward Gallery, are all artist proofs.<\/p>\n

I went along to the exhibition because, frankly, I\u2019ve never really got<\/em> Andreas Gursky. What I mean by that is that while I appreciate his skill as a photographer, and the grandiosity of his works\u2019 scale, I have never seen him as an artist far and away ahead of other photographers, as the prices of his pictures tend to suggest.<\/p>\n

I wanted to see if my eyes would be opened by this exhibition. Was I missing something? Why are some of his photos traded for millions of dollars?<\/p>\n

Reader, I still don\u2019t really understand. <\/p>\n

Gursky absolutely makes powerful pictures, often detailing man\u2019s impact on the landscape. And the scale of many of his photos is really important. They are often more than 2 metres wide or tall, some bigger than that. And Gursky\u2019s style is to have the lens wide open – everything should be in focus. Furthermore, and importantly, many of his images are composite photos made up from several images, with a significant amount of post-processing in software like Photoshop. Gursky is clearly a master at this kind of thing, because as he flattens out perspectives, you can\u2019t see the joins. <\/p>\n

I think the most obvious photomontage for me was a picture entitled Tour de France, which purported to show the race heading up a mountain. Except that somewhere in the lower portion of the image you could see the King of the Mountains banner – which would almost always be somewhere near the top. The images were probably taken from a helicopter, and I\u2019m not certain they were shot on a single mountain. You can\u2019t see enough detail, but some of the \u201cleading\u201d cyclists don\u2019t seem to be accompanied by camera bikes which would ordinarily be the case, while groups further down the mountain do. <\/p>\n

And Gursky also makes his colours pop quite a lot, often adding an almost ethereal glow to the pictures. <\/p>\n

So these are heavily manipulated images. But they don\u2019t pretend to be anything but that. And so I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n

Some of the images are not even taken by him. The exhibition features a satellite photo of Antarctica. I suspect that it\u2019s a heavily manipulated collage of many satellite images, and it\u2019s possible that Gursky commissioned his own images from a satellite photography provider. A second image of the North Atlantic claims to have had much of the clear water created with software. So perhaps Gursky was using imagery from a platform like ESA\u2019s Earth from Space.<\/A><\/p>\n

In another photo entitled Supernova we see a relatively decent example of astro-photography, but nothing especially impressive.<\/p>\n

Returning to that record selling Rhein II, which is displayed here, and what\u2019s most remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. Another photo-montage, Gursky has removed a powerstation to leave nothing else but the grassy banks, the river, and the sky. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m probably being unfair. Gursky\u2019s images are impressive, and he does have something to say. But I can\u2019t claim to have been converted by this exhibition. I would put him in a similar category to Damien Hirst, in that I can see the talent, but I don\u2019t really understand the appeal, and certainly don\u2019t understand the prices that are achieved by his works.<\/p>\n

Anyway, if you’ve not seen the exhibition, it’s too late, as it closed a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n

<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2011 a record price was set for the sale of a photograph. Rhein II by Andreas Gursky was sold at Christie\u2019s for $4.3m. It was the then highest price paid for a photograph (and likely remains so). Compared to the Leonardo da Vinci Salvador Munci painting that was sold for $450m last year, that\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[878,61],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7036,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions\/7036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}