Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime

Abstract

The German photographer Andreas Gursky takes pictures of enormous spaces—stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks—in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment—architectural, technological, and personal—on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy. Taken as a whole, Gursky's work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilized world.

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