Andreas Gursky started out shooting mostly black and white landscapes on a handheld camera, but in the 1990s he switched, taking the pictures that he has now become famous for. Out went analogue and in came epic panoramas that were digitally stitched together, capturing in intricate detail and colour stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, 99 cent stores, Olympic skiers and the crowd at a Madonna concert.
“My works,” he recalls, “were selling for more and more.” In fact, his rising status in the art world was reflected in his photographs inside Prada and Gucci stores – the former was taken while he was waiting for his wife, who was shopping there. Then, in 2011, Gursky’s 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (£2.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. “How do you deal with a thing like that?” he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d’Ingres, which went for $12.4 million.
