Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08 [Hardcover]

Martin Hentschel (Author), Andreas Gursky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2009

"In all eras there have been artists who have aspired to encyclopedic summation of the world, to find a form to accommodate the mess," as Samuel Beckett once put it. The Renaissance marked the juncture at which it became impossible for any one person to have read every book in existence (just as books became widely available for the first time, ironically); today it would be a feat even to count the number of toothpastes in your average grocery store. Andreas Gursky's photographs are merciless in their vertiginous will to make every last tube of toothpaste count, to compel every constituent into legibility. His optical fanaticism is not an effect of specific consumerist critique so much as a desire to set before the eye what was deemed too much for the mind, pressing the extreme surfeit of the world's contents against its limits. For this volume, Gursky has chosen more than 150 works from his fund of photographs, reaching back to his student days at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and his studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The earliest exposures here include the Desk Attendants series and other unpublished photographs, and the most recent images were conceived especially for the book. Every single exposure in Gursky's encyclopedic morphology is a vital piece in the puzzle, which, over the course of his 28-year career, has amounted to an encyclopedia of the unencompassable.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hatje Cantz; Bilingual edition (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3775723382
• ISBN-13: 978-3775723381
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #850,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Small, April 19, 2009

By 

Buffy (Sunnydale) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08 (Hardcover)

Finally had a chance to look at this and sadly the pictures are all quite small. Most of the horizontal pictures are reproduced on a single page, with white space around them, so maybe 4 x 6 inches? But there is so much going on in the photos it's all hard to see. Because of the small reproductions I give this book only 2 stars.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gursky 80 - 08, August 30, 2009

By 

steve "steve G" (Blue Diamond, NV, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08 (Hardcover)

This book is an exhibition catalogue and also a review of Gursky's work over 28 years - 1980- 2008. The two characterisitics of his photos are (i) view from a distance (ii) the opportunities this gives to portray repetition (of people, cars, desks, shoes, rain drops, roads, skyscra[er wndows, ceiling lights,etc..

One pair of photos shows an aerial view of vehicles and pedestrians and bus passengers in a traffic jam in Cairo. It is not cear what is happning - perhaps the people are vacating a broken down bus? Perhaps there has been a road accident. What seems to interest Gursky (and the viewer) is how the visual image of hundreds of identical or similar objects in spatial rhythm becomes an object in its own right. And how this comes to represent the character of a place - for example large numbers of canoeists on Lake Garda an Italian lake, windows in an HSBC office block in Hong Kong, a collection of Prada shoes, two enormous atriums in Atlanta and Times Square, hundreds of people walking across a glacier in the Engadin, hundreds of people at computer desks in a Hong Kong stock exchange.

I became interested in Andreas Gursky through seeing the exhibition of his work at the Vancover Art gallery in July 09. I then bought this book from Amazon on-line because I could not afford the $60 for the copy sold at the gallery. It was $25 - $30 cheaper to buy on line. Gursky is a most interesting artist - photographer.Someone whose work meant so much to me that I want to look at his pictures time and again - each time feeling I could learn from him something new.

5.0 out of 5 stars What an amazing book, December 8, 2011

By 

Felipe Abreu - See all my reviews

This review is from: Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08 (English and German Edition) (Hardcover)

This book is really well done. The paper is awesome and the cover, is really beautiful and has a good touch. The work of Andreas Gursky is really complex and vast. This retrospective shows a well done extract of 20 years of photographic work