Review
Andres Gursky
ANDREAS GURSKY, 2015. INKET PRINT.
We rely on photography for truth. Passport photos, war reportage, evidence, and documentation have established photography as a new eye, able to capture the world in absolute objectivity and spread an honest message far and wide. Yet from it’s origins, the medium has been manipulated in darkrooms and in camera, untruths are as much a part of the photographic story as their opposite. Andreas Gursky, amongst the most commercially successful art photographers in the world, established himself taking large scale photographs, in exacting detail, of a globalising world in the 90s. Trading floors, supermarkets, rivers, and nightclubs were depicted in monumental prints, and there was a remarkably objective eye, neither celebrating nor condemning the subjects but simply showing them in all their detail and beauty. So when, in 2015, he started to show photographs devoid of tangible truth, works composed digitally in his studio to create imagined scenes and places, he was simply shifting his focus to operate in a long tradition of photographic deception. Here, four German chancellors, who between them had ruled Germany since the mid 70s, sit behind glass, staring at the work of Abstract artist Barnett Newman. The scene never happened, Gursky used 5 photographs he had taken to construct this imagined observation, but it’s lack of historical grounding does not extend, perhaps, to a lack of truthfulness in its message.