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Gagosian Quarterly

Summer 2018 Issue

In Conversation

andreas gursky and jeff wall

On the occasion of a major survey of Andreas Gursky’s work at the Hayward Gallery in London, Gursky and Jeff Wall discuss the state of photography and the evolution of the medium.

Andreas Gursky, Utah, 2017

Andreas Gursky, Utah, 2017

Jeff WallThere is a distinction to be made between what I will call the “manner” of photographing for advertising and most magazine work and that which we usually accept as a way of photographing that conforms to the criteria and attitudes of pictorial art. Not only a distinction but a conflict. You can always tell when a photographer is working in the spirit of publicity, even when he or she appears to be making something serious, or trying to. This is a complicated matter because there are really no rules, and things that can appear very commercial and even objectionable turn out to be artistically really good—for example, some of Roe Ethridge’s work. This line has been blurred ever since Pop art emerged. But even keeping this large complication in mind, and knowing that there are no set guidelines, we always have to deal with this distinction. Because you began where you began, you must have had to deal with this right from the start.

Andreas GurskyI wasn’t just forced to deal with this difference, I had to completely free the way I saw from this old commissioned-photography aesthetic. As artists, it’s our job to see images liberated from existing known or acquired aesthetic standards.

I discovered how hard this was to do when I began to work digitally and started constructing my images. When I started out, I needed weeks, months to find an image.

Ethridge and [Christopher] Williams take an interesting approach to subtly frustrating the subject of commercial photography. This concept can only take one so far, though, and I find the original images they have created more interesting.

JWIt’s become pretty much conventional now to say that the kind of photograph you and I were making in 1995 or so is something no longer current—that is, the large-scale color image, possibly involving digital construction, in my case involving some form of “cinematography,” meant to establish a new scale and identity for photography closer to that of the other pictorial arts. It’s clear that younger artists feel that they have to go elsewhere—toward more overtly visible and mannered digital work, smaller scale, studio work involving various kinds of hand crafting, and of course dealing with the online image-traffic question. I get the feeling that younger artists are turned off by the prospects of working at a large scale, with all the attendant problems—that they see it as too involved with cultural spectacle and the whole ’90s upsurge of photography as a “museum art.” There’s a feeling of resistance to all that, probably also because of the market aspect. Nevertheless I feel quite akin to much of the newer work and have the feeling that the artists have gotten something positive from what we’ve been trying to do. It’s interesting also how much of this work takes it quite easy in terms of any distinction between photography and other things, like painting or collage. That’s a different attitude from the one that insisted on the total distinctness of photography from everything else, the one I grew up with. What do you think? Since you’re teaching, you’re likely to be closer to the situation than I am.

Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall

Andreas Gursky, Les Mées, 2016

AGYou’ve touched on a range of issues about which there is a lot to say. I understand your self-critical doubt, which also plagues me sometimes, but the fact that we appear less often in the contemporary discourse, or in the countless biennales, doesn’t mean in any way that our old works are no longer relevant. I’m thinking, for instance, of The Storyteller (1986), one of many of your works that haven’t lost any of their impact over the last thirty years. The idea that with purely photographic means one could engender a painterly impetus that connects so seamlessly with so many things I’d seen in art history—it really blew me away and inspired me in a very decisive way. And then there was the overwhelming size, the clarity of the formal composition, and your concept of using the familiar medium of advertising photography to allow something to not immediately look like art—a criterion that I often recommend to my students and one that hasn’t lost a shred of its currency. The introduction of the lightbox was an ingenious move and will always remain an unmistakable signature of your work.

I find it interesting, in the first instance, that you talk about our work. However different our works might appear to be individually, I see a great affinity between them. Yes, of course, you talk about filmic characteristics, and sometimes the subjects have a literary background or art-historical references. At a narrative level, I try to avoid these kinds of references—my most recent pictures are perhaps a little drier, a little more analytical. One could perhaps say that they function, societally speaking, as surrogates for physical states. I’m thinking, for instance, of Amazon [2016], the tulip pictures, or Les Mées [2016]. I see the essential commonality behind that which is depicted. The subject seems to be just a pretext for our interest in and concern with the way the world is constituted. The eye of the camera stands in for the position of the novice, who questions the world and who cannot construe things that are supposedly self-evident. I’m thinking here, for instance, of [your photograph of] the dismantled engine block carried by two men [2008]. Compared to the compositions of your masterworks, it looks almost unfinished, and yet it remains firmly fixed in my memory, in terms of what I was just talking about. In certain ways, it is perhaps paradoxical to want to say something about the way the world is constituted, while at the same time insisting on the visible in all its clarity and detail—an extension, so to speak, of textual speech and cognitive thinking. That probably sounds very theoretical and I’ve deviated rather from your questions, but ultimately it is also simply the pure joy of seeing and the fascination with it that constantly drives us to make new pictures.

I think that we have created an intrinsic visual system that believes in the possibility of depicting reality, and through it creating knowledge. We will probably never abandon this territory, and preserving this tradition doesn’t make any sense to the younger generation. Or they see very few possibilities in inheriting and developing it, because the field has already been ploughed and the whole subject has, as we so charmingly say in German, been gobbled up for breakfast. I completely agree that the younger generation have persuasively developed other approaches and have calmly disregarded concepts like authenticity. Concepts that, in certain ways, seem sacred to us. Wade Guyton comes to mind, who has broken new ground with his montage and destruction techniques and who bridges different disciplines convincingly. I think he is the big figure that the younger generation are identifying with at the moment.

Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Men move an engine block, 2008, gelatin silver print, 54 ½ × 69 ½ inches (138.5 × 176.5 cm) © Jeff Wall

JwYou and your colleagues who were at the [Kunstakademie Düsseldorf] with [Bernd and Hilla Becher] accepted the basic premise that photography, whatever else it might be, was specially rooted in the process of giving an account of the visible, of “things as they are,” or at least as they appear. In the ’80s and ’90s, your work was popularly seen as different from that, as part of a new kind of photography, but now it looks much more to be an extension, a “later phase” of classic modern photography, perhaps of German modern photography.

AgThe classic Becher students followed Bernd’s doctrine of typologically breaking down the phenomenology of the visible world and exploring a subject arising from that process, like a scientist dissecting their area of interest beneath a microscope. The tool used was generally the large-format camera with tripod, which offered the best basis for this. The generally accepted credo was as follows: life tells the best stories and one must simply help it to tell them. In this sense, we didn’t try to psychoanalyze, but kept our distance and picked light conditions that allowed for as much information and richness of detail as possible. A working method that was more focused on interpretation and subjectivity would have missed the target. The world was meant to appear as it actually is—it was for the viewer to come to any conclusions about it.

The first generation of the Düsseldorf School was able to profit from this approach and to develop important, individual artistic concepts. For instance, Thomas Struth, with his views of streets and architecture, and Thomas Ruff, with his prosaic architectural images and scientifically oriented pictures of stars, but primarily with his radical portraits. These images adhere to a certain mercilessness. Finally Candida Höfer created interiors with a wonderful lightness and poetry, which were grainy and not very sharp, but it didn’t do them any harm. She was the only one who worked with a small-format camera, showing that it could also be done differently. Despite this, she didn’t deviate a single centimeter from implementing her idiosyncratic interiors. She sometimes accompanied her father during his stays in the sanatorium and created completely unique images there.

But for the second generation, the concept was already starting to crumble and one tried to find new and unexplored areas to conquer. Both Jörg Sasse and I can be placed in the intersection between the first and the second generations. I saw straight away that our forebears had already covered most of the ground available and that the playing field was getting smaller and smaller.

To begin with, I put my plate camera in the cellar and tried my luck with a 6 × 7 Plaubel handheld camera, a compromise between the Leica M and Nikon F2 cameras common at the Folkwang [Folkwang Universität der Künste, where Gursky studied between 1978 and 1981] and the Linhofs and Plaubels that were common in the Düsseldorf School. This camera creates passable, sharp pictures, but, most important, doesn’t require a tripod and allows for a more spontaneous way of working, which would have a decisive effect on my visual language. Bernd grumbled that, yes, these early landscapes had a certain something, but that if I’d used a large-format camera they would have been much sharper, that is to say better. I didn’t feel like Bernd understood me enough during this period and listened more to Kasper König, who called these pictures “Sunday pictures.”

In retrospect, I can now say that the influence of the Bechers was completely seminal for me, but that it wasn’t the only foundation for the artistic position I hold today. It probably has something to do with the structure of my personality, that I can allow very different, sometimes contradictory archetypes and influences to coexist without them actually contradicting one another.

Unless otherwise noted, artwork © Andreas Gursky/DACS, 2018; interview published in full in Andreas Gursky (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018)

Inkjet print of Jeff Wall's "In the Legion" (2022)

Jeff Wall: In the Domain of Likeness

The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, has staged a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Here, Barry Schwabsky reflects on the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography.

Jeff Wall at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, in front of his photography

Jeff Wall: An Exhibition Tour

Join Jeff Wall as he leads a tour through his latest exhibition in Beverly Hills. The artist speaks about the genesis and creation of each photograph, addressing the aesthetic decisions involved.

Andreas Gursky, Salinas, 2021, Diasec-mounted inkjet print, framed: 80 × 160 ⅜ × 2 ½ inches (203.2 × 407.2 × 6.2 cm)

Andreas Gursky

On the occasion of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, Max Dax met with Andreas Gursky to speak with the photographer about his new work. Here, they discuss the consequences of the pandemic on certain works, the roles of techno music and art history in Gursky’s art process, and the necessary balance of beauty and honesty in the contemporary.

Takashi Murakami cover and Andreas Gursky cover for Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022 magazine

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022

The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).

Andreas Gursky, Jonathan Ive, 2019, fine art print mounted on dibond, 64 1/2 × 50 ⅝ inches (163.7 × 128.5 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London, commissioned; made possible by the Outset Commission, supported by Scott Collins in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 2019 © Andreas Gursky/VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn

Ive by Gursky: A Meeting of Minds

By exploring the conventions of past portraits of industrial designers and architects, Maria Morris Hambourg unpacks Andreas Gursky’s ingenious recent portrait of Apple designer Jony Ive to reveal its layered meanings.

Black-and-white photograph: Donald Marron, c. 1984.

Donald Marron

Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.

Jeff Wall, Low tide gull shadow, 2020, inkjet print, 23 x 26 inches (58.5 x 66 cm)

In Conversation
Jeff Wall and Gary Dufour

Jeff Wall speaks to Gary Dufour about his new photographs, made on the beachfront of English Bay in Vancouver, Canada, that record the endlessly varied and shifting patterns created in seaweed by the ebb and flow of the tide.

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992, transparency in lightbox, 90 ⅛ × 164 ⅛ inches (229 × 417 cm)

Death Valley ’89: Jeff Wall vs. Photography

Daniel Spaulding considers formal and technical developments in the photographer’s work against the background of global shifts of power and politics, specifically the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Josh Kline, Skittles, 2014, commercial fridge, lightbox, and blended liquids in bottles, 86 ½ × 127 ½ × 41 inches (219.7 × 323.9 × 104.1 cm) © Josh Kline. Photo:  © Timothy Schenck

Laws of Motion

Catalyzed by Laws of Motion—a group exhibition pairing artworks from the 1980s on by Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall with contemporary sculptures by Josh Kline and Anicka Yi—Wyatt Allgeier discusses the convergences and divergences in these artists’ practices with an eye to the economic worlds from which they spring.

Anselm Kiefer, Volkszählung (Census), 1991, steel, lead, glass, peas, and photographs, 163 ⅜ × 224 ½ × 315 inches (4.1 × 5.7 × 8 m)/

Cast of Characters

James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.

Anselm Kiefer, Maginot, 1977–93.

Veil and Vault

An exhibition at the Broad in Los Angeles prompts James Lawrence to examine how artists give shape and meaning to the passage of time, and how the passage of time shapes our evolving accounts of art.

Installation view of Jeff Wall exhibition at Gagosian, New York

Jeff Wall: The Space of Photography

Jeff Wall leads a tour through his most recent exhibition in New York.