In The Third Man, the casually murderous Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, gazes down from the top of a Ferris wheel at the tiny figures below and says to his one-time friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), ‘Look down there; would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?’ In his large-format photographs, Andreas Gursky asks similar questions, without the homicidal overtones but with the same appreciation of the awkward fit of humanism and modern mass society.
Like Lime on the Ferris wheel, Gursky often
looks down at the world from a great height. He reduces people to dots and
their surroundings to large grid-like patterns. He takes structures that are
already massive and homogeneous and, through cropping and digital
manipulation, he makes them more so. His supermarket is filled with brightly
packaged goods but their singular claims are at once quashed by the vast
proportions and functional organisation of the space. His Parisian housing
estate continues beyond the limits of the frame, forming a grimly uniform
tapestry of windows that could in theory extend indefinitely. His quayside
park, with its allusions to pre-modern landscaping, looks quaint, even
slightly comical, next to the construction project that is underway just
beyond the shoreline. In each case, he uses large-format photography to
convey a sense of disproportion, of huge spaces or enterprises and tiny,
undifferentiated figures. And that sense of disproportion is at times so
disorienting that it has a miniaturising effect; then his figures look like
toy soldiers and his settings like scale models. Gursky is alert to both the
dehumanising and the absurd in today’s world.
His work often leaves you wondering where to stand. Tellingly, in
Wallflowers, a show of large-format photographs held this summer at the
Kunsthaus Zürich, most of the visitors walked right up to Gursky’s pictures
and examined them bit by bit. Now that it is technically feasible to make
large, high-definition photos without sacrificing depth of field, pictures
like Gursky’s carry a wealth of visual information. It is tempting to scan
his work for human interest, for anecdotal details that might relieve the
faintly oppressive vastness and order. But there are none. Where Jeff Wall
(for one) creates mini-narratives of alienation, Gursky tells of alienation
by keeping narrative out of the picture.
Gursky, like Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte, studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. The Bechers too were interested in questions of scale. They took photos of disused industrial buildings, annotated them and organised them into series. The photos are clearly meant to be read as documents, but they also have a Romantic air about them: each silo, kiln and water tower filling the frame and taking on a sombre, monolithic quality as it looms over the viewer. The Bechers’ industrial relics are descended from Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’. They are crushing, they are not built to human proportions – they are, to use Edmund Burke’s term, sublime.
Gursky’s work is sublime too, of course, but not in quite the same sense. His structures are inhuman in scale, but familiar in function. While the Bechers present the hidden face of modernity in handsome black and white, Gursky shows the glossy surface of post-industrial society in bright, occasionally garish colour. In his work, the sublime becomes almost mundane.
And that is the point. As Fredric Jameson
has observed, there is something sublime about the world of today. The
Internet, the microchip, the networks of global corporatism: they are too
large or small, too complex or immaterial to be easily grasped and
represented. Like Turner’s Alpine landscapes or the Bechers’ industrial
monoliths, they make no allowances for the human form and that gives them a
vertiginous quality. But they have none of the pathos of the mountain vista
or abandoned industrial plant. They may be remote, even invisible, but their
effects are with us every day and so too is this new, degraded experience of
the sublime.
Gursky is not alone in using large-format photography to capture
incongruities of scale and hint that they are somehow emblematic of the
present. In their photographic work, Jane and Louise Wilson focus on large,
unoccupied constructions that carry the imprint of vast bureaucracies and
heady, often sinister technological ambitions. Like Gursky’s work, their
photos can be disorienting. Which way is the camera pointing in their shot
of the abandoned Soviet launch pad at Baykonyr – up, down or across? It
takes a moment to get your bearings; and even then, you are left guessing at
the structure’s exact scale. In his aerial shots of sprawling metropolitan
centres (Mexico City, Tokyo, Chicago), Balthasar Burkhard turns them into
vast encrusted carpets spreading to muggy horizon lines. In their
invocations of the sublime, Burkhard and the Wilson twins are more laconic
and straight-faced than Gursky – they are closer, in that sense, to the
Bechers – but they share his preoccupation with vastness and disproportion
as metaphors for the economic and technological underpinnings of the
information age.
Obviously, there are divergent tendencies within large-format photography.
In her shots of her mother, for instance, Melanie Manchot regularly uses
backdrops that explicitly recall Romantic landscape painting, but the figure
of her mother is monumentalised not dwarfed by them and the claims of the
individual are miraculously reasserted in the face of the sublime. In his
photos of the Swiss lakes, Jean-Marc Bustamante refers to the Romantic
sublime but undoes it with prosaic details that point to present-day
imperatives of profit and expediency. For Bustamante, the sublime represents
a lost ideal that exposes the crassness of contemporary society. He and
Manchot have Romantic sympathies that are largely foreign to Gursky. But the
fact remains that much of the more compelling work in large-format
photography revisits the sublime. And for many of the artists working in the
medium, starting with Gursky, the photography of disproportion provides a
window onto precisely those aspects of today’s world that make it otherwise
so difficult to represent.
Marcus Verhagen is a freelance writer and curator