German photographer Andreas Gursky, whose massive digitally-stitched panoramas have redefined contemporary photography, is showcasing his most diverse collection of work yet at London's White Cube Masons Yard gallery. The 70-year-old artist, famous for creating what he calls "impossible images," has moved from his signature epic-scale works to include intimate iPhone photographs in his latest exhibition running from October 11 to November 8.
Gursky's career transformation began in the 1990s when he abandoned black and white landscape photography shot with handheld cameras. Instead, he pioneered a technique of creating massive panoramas by digitally stitching together multiple photographs, capturing intricate details of stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, 99-cent stores, Olympic skiers, and concert crowds. "My works were selling for more and more," Gursky recalls, noting how his rising art world status was reflected in photographs he took inside Prada and Gucci stores - the Prada shot was taken while waiting for his wife to finish shopping.
The photographer achieved global recognition in 2011 when his 1999 color photograph "Rhein II," showing a horizontal vista of the Rhine River flowing across flat fields near Düsseldorf, sold for $4.3 million at auction. The price was nearly double its estimate, making it the world's most expensive photograph at the time. "How do you deal with a thing like that?" Gursky wondered about the record-breaking sale. The record stood until 2022, when Man Ray's surrealist masterpiece "Le Violon d'Ingres" sold for $12.4 million.
Gursky's monumental works require incredible complexity and patience, often taking several years to complete. He typically finishes only three works per year, creating them by taking series of pictures, sometimes at different locations, then combining the parts that fit together into single, impossible images. "They're really done as big as I can," he explains about the crucial importance of scale. "You can't get bigger technically. Photos don't go bigger than mine." Given their ambition, complexity, and scale, critics have compared Gursky's photographs to paintings.
The current White Cube exhibition features just 16 pieces, but Gursky considers it his most varied presentation ever. "I don't think I've ever presented such different types of work," he says. The show spans his entire career, from "Gas Cooker," one of his earliest works from 1980 showing an elevated view of his student apartment's illuminated stove rings, to brand new iPhone photographs. Another early piece depicts German environmental activists protesting in trees against village destruction, with a German sign reading "The view from here is shit."
Among the new works is a melancholic image of a glowing steel ingot, which Gursky describes as "a swansong to the Rhine's precarious steel industry." The exhibition also includes one of his first iPhone pictures - a playful diptych showing his wife at home adding a block to a Jenga tower while balancing a box on her head. These intimate, spontaneous works contrast sharply with his reputation as a distant observer creating mass-scale images.
The exhibition nearly faced postponement when Gursky called gallerist Jay Jopling months ago requesting a delay. Jopling refused, telling him, "No way, no deal - I've given you the best date in the whole year. You have to cope and get it done." This pressure led Gursky to create 10 new pictures for the show, which he admits is "a lot for the way I work." One breakthrough came unexpectedly when a towel accidentally fell into his bathtub. "Underwater, it looked like magical realism," he explains. "I was under huge pressure to create for the exhibition, then an image fell into my lap. I pressed click and there it was."
Despite his fame for meticulously constructed impossible images, the 70-year-old artist now takes delight in the iPhone's simplicity. The exhibition includes several smaller-scale, diary-like snapshots, from newborn family members to the accidentally dropped towel suspended in bathwater with bubbles around its folded form. When viewed closely, viewers can see pixels fuzzing at the edges, highlighting Gursky's long-standing interest in how we perceive the world through photographic fragments.
One standout new work is a remake of a quintessential 1993 piece depicting a Parisian apartment building with 1,122 windows. Gursky believes the new version is superior, consisting of multiple winter photographs when sunlight wasn't glaring and curtains remained mostly open, revealing dozens of tiny glimpses into residents' lives. "It's about the inner life of the building," he explains. "It's a panopticon of habits, tastes, and how people like to furnish their apartments." The image creates a paradox - showing an impossible view of nearly the entire building by combining photographs of segments shot from the opposite hotel.
Another exhibition highlight features an unnamed famous English pop star, whom Gursky met through gallerist Jopling. While the musician was already a Gursky fan, the photographer had never heard of him. They became friends, and Gursky accompanied the star on tour, capturing him from behind in a glittering Gucci ensemble performing before a stadium crowd of shimmering, cheering faces and iPhones. Gursky once requested a similar behind-the-scenes perspective with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but she declined. "I guess it wasn't a very charming offer - to photograph her from behind," he admits.
Gursky's path to photography fame began during his student days at Düsseldorf's legendary Kunstakademie, where he studied alongside Thomas Ruff. He recalls an evening in a pub when a respected German art dealer approached them, declaring, "You guys are going to be famous!" At the time, Gursky says, "I couldn't have imagined I would become an artist and that I would exclusively devote my life to photography."
Working from his vast, bright studio in a former electricity factory in Düsseldorf, Gursky shares the space with Ruff and artists Laurenz Berges and Axel Hütte. The building has been transformed over decades by architects Herzog & de Meuron, who also designed London's Tate Modern, and now includes a gallery housing Gursky's art collection of mainly German Rhineland artists.
Gursky's success seems partially predetermined given his family background. Both his grandfather Hans and father Willy were successful commercial photographers who trained him in advertising photography techniques from a young age. "I have to admit there were advantages" when he reached art school, he says. "I was very familiar with the technique - but it was also an enormous disadvantage, as I was shaped by the aesthetics of advertising photography. I had to lose that along the way, somehow."
At the Kunstakademie, Gursky studied under Bernd Becher, one half of the influential husband-and-wife duo credited with launching the Düsseldorf school of photography - Germany's biggest art movement since Bauhaus. The Bechers encouraged students to bring detached, dispassionate perspectives to documentary photography, focusing on postwar Germany's declining industrial landscapes and architecture. "We worked at their place," Gursky remembers. "There were only six of us in the class, so it was very intimate and intense. They taught us how to see - and you do that best if you concentrate on one subject in depth."
The White Cube exhibition demonstrates Gursky's unique vision: seismographic, sometimes deadpan, and always filled with wonder. In a world saturated with thoughtless, quickly forgotten photographs, every piece in the gallery was created with purpose. "Content plays a big role," he emphasizes. "But it's only after I have taken a photograph that I really discover what an image is about. I ask myself, 'Is it relevant for society - or is it just formalism?'" When he concludes it's merely formalistic, his response is simple: "Then I delete it."
