Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky (b. 1955, Leipzig, FDR) grew up in Düsseldorf where his father operated a commercial photography studio.
He studied photography at Düsseldorf Art Academy where, in 1980, he followed courses with Bernd and Hilla Becher. The couple were known for their typological series of photographs of industrial heritage structures, which they captured in an efficient and objective manner using a large format, view camera. Their formal, conceptual approach was a major influence on Gursky and his fellow students – who would collectively become known as the Düsseldorf School – and it was, in part, thanks to them that photography gained increased regard as an autonomous art form.

Gursky produces photographs in enormous formats, immersing the viewer in the contemporary world of labour, capital, globalization and mass consumption. He turns his lens on human relationships to the environment, interested not in the individual, but rather in the structures produced by mankind – where we live, work and consume, and how we relate to, and move about in, the spaces around us.

“Because of the complexity of the work I have to take my time, it forces me to seriously look. I really want to discover more and more in it, because I am afraid that I’ll miss something. I’m trying to figure out what’s happening, what all those people are doing.”