Andreas Gursky: Early Landscapes, Sprüth Magers

Andreas Gursky is now famous for dramatic photographs of man-made things dwarfing even the imagination of the men that made them. He uses digital photography, manipulates his images, and goes for human products. This was not always the case.

Originally Gurksy went along the lines of Ansel Adams. He liked pointing his camera at what everyone who has ever owned a camera points it at: long, deep landscapes with hills, rivers and trees, and scenery that is naturally artistic-looking enough to form a ‘vista’. Take, for example, a set of misty mountains as in Gursky’s 1987 photograph Seilbahn, Dolomiten or the magisterial Niagara Falls, which he photographed in 1989. They all have his distinctive elevated viewpoint, influenced by the British photographer John Davies who also used large formats and high angles to depict very British industry.

But Gursky manages to bring a little bit of something not present in Davies’ or even Adams’ photographs. He seems to always bring a human element. The landscape is always contrasted with something in it, usually something recognisably human-sized compared to a world that is not. The small paddleboat in Niagara edges towards an extremely impressive and powerful waterfall which is for them, us  and Gursky, no longer just a tourist attraction. The wading men in Alba (1989) are contrasted to the timeless presence of the river. In a flash of what is to come, Mettmann, Autobahn (1993) shows a vast open cow field through a gaze that is intermittently obscured by the close-up metal bars of an Autobahn. 

This type of emotion is equivalent to staring at stars and having an “aren’t we, like, so small” moment; relatively uncomplicated in contrast to Gursky's later work involving actual man-made things. But then again to be jaded by the entire cosmos is one sophistication too far. Gursky has left the natural world behind in his recent works which will be shown at White Cube, Bermondsey from the 30 April – 6 July. His most famous nature shot is perhaps Rhein II (1999), where the humans and buildings around the Rhine were photoshopped out leaving just a placid river. This became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction bringing down the hammer at $4.3 million at Christie’s, New York in 2011. That is all very well, but it makes a certain movement from pure photography to “art theory”. Sprüth Magers will show us the photographic equivalent of ‘The Early Drawings’; how the master got his eye for a scene. They are simply impressive.