Andreas Gursky best known for his massive architectural and perspective photographs. He uses extremely wide, panoramic-like angles to create an overwhelming sense of presence and space. His subjects bear some sort of repetition. He also photographed workers at their workplace, treating them in the same way.
The composition of Gursky’s images are nothing like mine – they show people working at their workplace – mine are the opposite – portraits of workers in their workplace, but not working. Gursky’s photographs are packed with detail.
The second picture is of the assembly room at Siemens in Karlsruhe. The wheeled trolleys are individually numbered and the racks carry all sort of labelled materials. You could, if you were sufficiently interested, piece together the processes from the evidence available, as you could in many of Gursky’s large-scale pictur
es of manufacturing. But would you really care to implicate yourself in al that complexity, even if it does involve other people’s lives? Gursky’s subject is not so much the world out there as an autonomous system in itself, as our reading of this world. His suggestion is not that working life is deplorable and that we must sympathize with its participants, but that we are in no position to come to any conclusions whatever, that we lack analytical capacity even when the evidence is as thick on the ground as it is here. (The Photography Book, 1997:188)
es of manufacturing. But would you really care to implicate yourself in al that complexity, even if it does involve other people’s lives? Gursky’s subject is not so much the world out there as an autonomous system in itself, as our reading of this world. His suggestion is not that working life is deplorable and that we must sympathize with its participants, but that we are in no position to come to any conclusions whatever, that we lack analytical capacity even when the evidence is as thick on the ground as it is here. (The Photography Book, 1997:188)