Andreas Gursky

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A student of Bernd and Hilda Becher, Andreas Gursky makes tightly: composed, highly formalized images of contemporary urban life: a hotel lobby, a dance floor, store displays, Hong Kong skyscrapers. His recurring motif is that of vast urban landscapes in which people appear as ant-like against their, architectural backdrops. The result is a continual feeling, upon viewing his photographs, of the relative smallness of our individual selves and also of our loneliness in the "public" spaces we have bought for ourselves. His work is compelling both for photographers and for architects: his are pictures that capture the strange decentered geometry of our industrialized and commercialized urban spaces. This carefully produced book -- with crystal screen separations -- shows three years of work, 1994 to 1997, and includes an essay by Gijs van Tuyl.