ANDREAS GURSKY
size m a tter s
by E f re m Ze l on y -Mi n d e l l
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can recall the first photographer whose name I ever memorized. It
wasn’t for any reason other than the sheer power of depth and the contained universe inside his com-
position. It left a distinct and indelible mark in my mind. It wasn’t because of what I would later come
to realize as trademark print size because the first time I ever saw an Andreas Gursky photograph was
on a computer screen. The power of his photograph’s scale is in the beating values of color and the
tactile quality of voluminous details. Somehow the mind instinctively knows that bigness is in feeling
as much as in physicality. Gursky has that kind of power. That first photograph I saw was the Chicago
Board of Trade, 1999 and I will never forget the feeling I had the first time I saw it. I still feel it every time
I come back to that photograph, and any time I see any Gursky image on a screen, or in a book, or in
person. I’m six foot four, that’s seventy-six inches. I find that significant to share because as a somewhat
big object myself, the world often seems slightly different. At least most people I meet, as most are
shorter than I am, tend to unwittingly blurt out, “You’re really tall!” But to be in a room with a Gursky
photograph — I am immediately aware of me inside of my room, inside the building I live in, on the
block of my neighborhood, in the county of a city, in the state of the country, on the planet inside the
galaxy that is just one part of our universe. And suddenly, everything comes into perspective.
There is an undeniable implication of the Earth in nearly every frame of Gursky’s. Fields of solar pan-
els surf across the hills in the image Les Meés, 2016, an impeccable pattern of repetition that absorbs
light as it skirts the green hills even on a cloudy day. Our closest star, the sun, stares into the eyes of
all these rows of machines, reflecting back into Gursky’s camera, and then sinking into the pupils of
viewers. Huge portions of visual work happen instantly in a Gursky photograph. Something so mas-
sive becomes so wrapped up in instantaneously small parts and then traverses back again into the
gargantuan. The prints are kept in frames that feel like they could house gaseous interstellar bodies.
An idea can be as small as an inch, the effects of those implications echo out loud into the corners of
rooms and into the vastness of minds. Gursky is no stranger to the play between macro and micro.
An individual’s interpretation dissects the imagery, coursing the veins of mountains and fields and
Portrait by Tom Lemke. All images courtesy Sprüth Magers.
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