Andreas Gursky at Louisiana

This volume concentrates on the classic compositions one associates with photographer Andreas Gursky: views captured at a great distance, from a slightly elevated perspective, the camera positioned as centrally as possible in front of the motif a la Bernd and Hilla Becher. It features all of the famous Gursky icons—such as the 99-cent store, the racetrack at Bahrain, the Tokyo and Chicago stock exchanges, the miners’ locker room, and the racetrack pit stops—as well as his most recent photos, for instance his Ocean series (2010) and pictures of the final parade of a show by fashion designers Viktor & Rolf (2011). These photographs ideally illustrate the artist’s frequently quoted remark that he wants to show us our world from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, an alien. And thus Andreas Gursky’s works reveal the outrageous and the exorbitant as well as the beautiful and sublime, always starting from the relationship between the human being and space.