Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky 99c

During a visit to MoMa in New York last week I was once again captivated by the photographs of Andreas Gursky. This is not the first time I have had a 'Gursky experience'. His photos are also in the Tate Modern in London, another place like MoMa which usually sends me away a slightly different person.

Let me try to say what it is about Gursky that I like, with my limited knowledge of photography.

Gursky's photos are no doubt compositions as studied as they are high res. But they seem spontaneous. The iconic 99c (above) is a good example. It is, perhaps, a contrived scene made by methodical placement of items in rows, as some amateur photographers on Flickr have recently implied. For example, There are hardly any items hanging down in the picture, as you usually find in these peculiarly American bargain stores where everything costs less than a dollar. In Gursky's picture it all looks serenely neat and tidy.

(I went in one of these stores last week just off Sixth Avenue and was struck how un-Gursky it looked, more like a rag-bag jumble sale than serried ranks of commodified objects).

Even so, the photograph looks so natural and unforced. It's like a panoramic glimpse, a sudden revelation of the unnoticed, the mundane come to life in an instant, the everyday wrapped in the stillness of routine. It's like a scene we have all seen, but not witnessed. It's so American, and so real. And no wonder people spend ages in front of this photograph.

I remember seeing 99c for the first time and getting pleasantly lost in it. I get this roaming feeling - as if looking is not constrained by the frame but almost forgets it in the plethora of detail - with many of Gursky's photos: the Chicago trading floor, the Montparnesse flats, the May Day crowd. It's as if there is no centre to these pictures, except the one (or ones) that you make for yourself. The composition is in the details, and the manner in which the details both hang together in a single scene and, at the same time, pull away from that scene, assert their own minute individuality.

From a distance, Gursky's compositions look like 'the same thing'; but then they burst into an abundance of detail which is seemingly endless. There is a tension which does not resolve between the 'context' and these stubborn, quirky little details. They conform, but also resist.

What he captures - but this is not the right verb at all, since his work is not about pinning something down but releasing something, letting it go - is the profusion of uniqueness in repetition. Each Montparnesse flat window looks 'the same'. But each window is uniquely different despite that sameness. You get lost in the closer look that dis-proves the first impression.

In Roland Barthe's terms, Gursky is all 'stubborn detail', what he called punctum. This is the detail in a photograph which appears incidental to the main topic or function - the studium - but which you can't take your eyes from, you keep coming back to. It's the detail which compels an emotional attention, the small thing that sticks in the memory. In each Gursky photo there are dozens of puncta - stubbornly interesting details which create mini-narratives of their own, sometimes at odds with the big picture, always pulling centres away into profusion, losing the viewer.

Here the 'frame' becomes important. What is the purpose of the frame in Gursky's photographs? The frame reminds us that we are dealing with an artifact, a construction, a positioned view of the world. But the frame does not tell us necessarily how to read the photograph. The frame is so benign it could be moved and the profusion of detail would persist. It's a framing that wishes to give itself up as much as it also invites us into the image, and allows us to get lost in compelling detail.
For more on Andreas Gursky, see this MoMa page

Photograph 'London, art' courtesy of 'hinke' on Flickr, see here.