He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs , often using a high point of view. His works reach some of the highest prices in the art market among living photographers. At the time it was the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. Gursky was born in Leipzig , East Germany in Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies , whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.
Before the s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In , Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works: [ 9 ]. The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky I had the disorienting sensation that something was happeningβhappening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic colour printsβsome of them up to six feet high by ten feet longβhad the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs.
Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance. The perspective in many of Gursky's photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. In a retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art described the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation.
It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works.
His photography is straightforward. The photograph 99 Cent was taken at a 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and depicts its interior as a stretched horizontal composition of parallel shelves, intersected by vertical white columns, in which the abundance of "neatly labeled packets are transformed into fields of colour, generated by endless arrays of identical products, reflecting off the shiny ceiling" Wyatt Mason.
