Salerno, also known as Salerno I, is a colour photograph created by German photographer Andreas Gursky in 1990. The picture marked a turning point in the artist's work. [1]
After departing from the initial influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gursky started depicting large, epic landscapes, sometimes dwarfing human presence, in the 1980s. The current photograph marks a shift in the creative direction of the artist, when he started digitally manipulating his photographs. This picture of the port of Salerno, south Italy, is impressive in its scale, which seems reminiscent of the 19th century landscape painters. [2]
The picture depicts the busy port of Salerno, with his ships and a large amount of multicolored vehicles and other cargo awaiting transport, while the small houses are also visible, and the surrounding mountains, at the background. According to Finn Blythe: "Juxtaposing size with detail: the multi-colour cargo awaiting transit, the bustling port and miniature houses, each section of the photograph offers up its own depth that demands hours of individual inspection. This is a constant for Gursky, whose photographs hover between micro and macro both in terms of perspective: the enormous image with microscopic detail, and theme: the local place that reveals a universal zeitgeist of modernity." [2]
From this point, Gursky pictures started to use a large-scale, high-resolution format of human made creations, like airports, stock exchanges, buildings, landscapes, often omitting or downplaying human presence, which have been a constant of his work. Gursky stated on this picture: "I saw immediately that pattern, that pictorial density, that industrial aesthetic. This image became an important piece for me, a turning point. It opened up a new sense of possibility, stylistically and thematically. I tried photographing other ports, but I realised that wasn't what had made the Salerno image work. It was the balance between great scale and a huge amount of sharp detail." [1]
A print of the photograph, with the dimensions of 170.18 cm by 205.11 cm, is held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [3]
Large format refers to any imaging format of 9 cm × 12 cm or larger. Large format is larger than "medium format", the 6 cm × 6 cm or 6 cm × 9 cm size of Hasselblad, Mamiya, Rollei, Kowa, and Pentax cameras, and much larger than the 24 mm × 36 mm frame of 35 mm format.
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Hilla Becher was a German conceptual photographer. Becher was well known for her industrial photographs, or typologies, with longtime collaborator and husband, Bernd Becher. Her career spanned more than 50 years and included photographs from the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy.
Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images".
99 Cent II Diptychon is a two-part colour photograph made by Andreas Gursky in 2001. It was based on an original photograph called 99 Cent, from 1999, sometimes called "99 cent.1999".
"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography held at the George Eastman House's International Museum of Photography from October 1975 to February 1976. The show, curated by William Jenkins, had a lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to American landscape photography. The New Topographics photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore, documented built and natural landscapes in America, often capturing the tension between natural scenery and the mundane structures of post-war America: parking lots, suburban homes, crumbling coal mines. The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as "neutral" in style, "reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion".
Rhein II is a colour photograph made by German visual artist Andreas Gursky in 1999. In the image, a river flows horizontally across the field of view, between flat green fields, under an overcast sky. Extraneous details such as dog walkers and a factory building were removed by the artist using digital editing.
Chicago Board of Trade II is a colour photograph by German artist Andreas Gursky made in 1999. It was created following his usual process of taking several pictures of the same subject and then manipulating and merging the scanned results by computer.
Chicago Board of Trade is a colour photograph made by German artist Andreas Gursky in 1997. It is the original picture that he took of the Chicago Board of Trade, of which he would make new versions in 1999 and in 2009. The photograph had six editions, one of which is at The Broad Museum, in Los Angeles. It is also a part of a series that the artist made on the subject of stock exchanges and board of trades across the world, since 1990.
Chicago Board of Trade III is a color photograph made by German artist Andreas Gursky in 1999–2009. It is the third version of the original picture, previously titled Chicago Board of Trade (1997) and Chicago Board of Trade II (1999). The artist used the same previous process of manipulating the images by computer before achieving the final result.
Los Angeles is a colour photograph made by German visual artist Andreas Gursky in 1998. It is an edition of six. The image was manipulated by computer, following the artist usual process. Its one of the largest examples of the artist's work.
Paris, Montparnasse is a colour photograph created by German photographer Andreas Gursky in 1993. The large photograph has the overall dimensions of 210 by 395 cm, and had a five copies edition.
Rhein, also known as Rhein I, is a colour photograph created by the German photographer Andreas Gursky in 1996. The photograph had a six copies edition. This was the first version of a photograph that become better known with his second version, Rhein II, in 1999.
Shanghai is a color photograph by German photographer Andreas Gursky created in 2000. The photograph has variable large dimensions, with the one held at the Art Institute of Chicago having 306 by 206 cm, and has a six prints edition.
Pyongyang IV is a colour photograph created by German photographer Andreas Gursky in 2007. It is part of the series Pyongyang, consisting of seven photographs, digitally executed after his presence at the Arirang Mass Games, that used to be held every year at the Rungrado May Day Stadium, in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, in tribute to the late Communist ruler Kim Il Sung.
Frankfurt is a colour photograph created by German photographer Andreas Gursky in 2007. It was created by his usual method of digital manipulation. It has a six copies edition. It depicts a scene taking place at the boarding lounge of the Frankfurt airport, in Germany.
99 Cent is a colour photograph by German photographer Andreas Gursky, created in 1999. It depicts a view of the interior of a 99 cent store in Los Angeles. It was created with the use of digital manipulation, like the artist does for his work since 1990. The photograph was included by Time magazine in the list of the 100 most important photographs ever taken in 1999. Gursky made a new version of this photograph, 99 Cent II Diptychon, in 2001, which would be one of the most expensive ever sold.