Customer Reviews

Andreas Gursky: Works 80-08

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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.

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.

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