Andreas Gursky has a knack for photographing city scape's and urban environments whilst using colour, content and scale to evoke an emotional response to his work. I always feel like his images are telling or asking something of you.
Living in leeds and using his abstract industrial images as a basis, i feel architecture is an ideal motif for content.
“…there is nothing in Gursky’s work itself to suggest any kind of critique of these massive projects he photographs so grandly. Rather everything looks to me like the Grand Glorification of Money and Industry. Look how much of the earth we can take over for our racetrack. Look at how our structures dwarf the tiny humans. Even his natural subjects start to look like Land to be Colonized. It’s the Capitalist Sublime. Of course it helps to remember just how much these pictures cost, and who’s buying them. Do the bank-owners believe they’re spending six figures on a critique of their wealth?”
The world of German photographer Andreas Gursky is nothing if not familiar,
yet, everything within it is somehow askew. The overriding sensation one gets upon studying a Gursky photograph is that of having stumbled onto the documentation of an unfamiliar ritual practice. Large buildings hover in carefully staggered formations, nature rears and roars in all its overwhelming heft, and individuals gather in mysterious agglomerations. Obviously, the real-life explanation behind a work such as “Sha Tin” (1994), could be quickly be glommed with a careful look. The massed crowd of spectators– gathered round an empty, grassy oval, staring at a video monitor behind which four identical apartment blocks are punched into the landscape in front of the receding mountains– are watching a horse race.
The video monitor in the left background tells us as much, with its image of jockeys keenly pushing their horses along, aerodynamically positioning themselves along the horses’ flanks. Nonetheless, Gursky’s photo has no real horses and relies solely on their filmed representation.
This absence clarifies two of Gursky’s frequently twinned artistic interests:
first, he wants to deliberately bring out the mystery of contemporary life and make it strange; second, he wants to use photography in the service of a political agenda.
Gursky’s photographs, fully embracing this mystery, and documenting the shrines of late-capitalist existence, make beautiful the very things he critiques. More precisely, he shows his images to us, his audience, in such a way as to bring out their innate beauty. Gursky’s bright, crisp images, every inch of his oversized photos in sharp focus, filled with individual detail and colour, are lovely enough to serve as
brochure photos for the world’s Chamber of Commerces. What supplies them with their bite is their unflinching eye, which reveals every object to be a manifestation of an unseen order silently at work, everywhere.
What gives Gursky the power to endure is his unflinching humanism,
which emerges in the most unexpected of places, through the most surprising of channels.
To my mind, the most powerful Gursky work, and the most inspired commentary on our human condition, is one of his photographs in which the human form is entirely absent.
Alvazer - Koyaanisqatsi patchwork
Really like how the colour allows for this building to take one a whole new meaning. It feels patchwork. With this sort of shot, and enhancements and exaggerations to colour made in photoshop , this image could be transformed into the uncanny.....
Thomas Hawk
No comments:
Post a Comment