Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. These outrageous visual orgies, these colossal symphonies of pixels signed Andreas Gursky, are not mere photographs. They are glacial autopsies of our globalized civilization, methodical cartographies of late capitalism, merciless radiographies of our sick planet.
Understand this well: Gursky is not just a man with a camera. He is a clinical anthropologist who dissects our era with surgical precision. His omniscient eye hovers over our world like that of a cold and distant god, with no apparent judgment but with no complacency.
From his glass tower in Düsseldorf, this former student of the Bechers travels the planet to capture human hives, temples of commerce, cathedrals of finance. He photographs the places where our common destiny is written: stock exchanges, factories, ports, supermarkets, anonymous buildings, with a maniacal obsession for exhaustivity. Each photograph is a complete world, hyperreal, a totality that overwhelms us.
Remember well, for example, “Rhein II” (1999), this irresistibly perfect image of the German Rhine that pulverized all records by becoming the most expensive photograph ever sold. What irony! An image of absolute austerity, almost abstract, representing a domesticated, rationalized, optimized landscape, exactly like our global economy. The river reduced to a simple horizontal line, framed by strips of desolate lawn, under a uniform gray sky. Gursky numerically erased a power plant that marred his composition. Of course, he did! He is not a journalist, he is an artist. His vision transcends the mere documentary and ventures into the territory of essential truth.
The contemporary panopticon: Foucault and visual surveillance
If we seek to understand Gursky’s work, it is impossible to ignore its kinship with the thought of Michel Foucault. Gursky’s photographs function as immense visual panopticons [1]. This Foucauldian concept, borrowed from carceral architecture, defines a system where everything can be observed from a central point without the observer being visible themselves. Isn’t this exactly the position that Gursky occupies in his works? The photographer places us in a position of total surveillance, where we can see everything, scrutinize everything, from an invisible position of authority.
Take “Paris, Montparnasse” (1993), this modernist building facade where each apartment, each private life is simultaneously exposed in a ruthless grid. Or “Tokyo Stock Exchange” (1990), where the traders are reduced to agitated particles in a system that exceeds them. Or “Amazon” (2016), which reveals the labyrinthine entrails of a giant warehouse, a symbol of our dematerialized consumption. Are these images not the perfect visual manifestation of what Foucault called power dispositifs? Systems that control, normalize, and discipline bodies and minds through specific architectures.
Gursky’s photographic approach, with its elevated and distant viewpoint, its absolute sharpness, and its frontal perspective, creates what Foucault would have called an “omnivoyant gaze.” A gaze that naturalizes surveillance in our society to the point that we accept it as normal. As Foucault wrote in “Discipline and Punish,” modern power functions precisely through this permanent visibility that ensures the automatic functioning of power. The subjects know that they are potentially always observed, which leads them to self-discipline.
In “Pyongyang” (2007), Gursky pushes this logic to its paroxysm by documenting the North Korean choreographed mass games, where thousands of individuals are reduced to colored pixels in a perfectly coordinated mass. The individual disappears completely in favor of a de-individualized collective organism. But the irony is that this totalitarian vision is only the exaggeration of our own condition in the globalized capitalism that Gursky documents elsewhere.
As Foucault would have emphasized, power is no longer exercised exclusively in a repressive manner, but productively, by inciting behaviors, shaping desires. It is no longer Big Brother who watches us, but the very structure of our economic and social system that constrains us. The spaces photographed by Gursky, shopping centers, luxury hotels, stadiums, are dispositifs that produce certain types of behaviors and subjectivities.
Spatio-temporal compression: David Harvey and accelerated capitalism
If Foucault helps us understand the political dimension of the spaces photographed by Gursky, the theory of “spatio-temporal compression” of the Marxist geographer David Harvey [2] allows us to analyze their economic dimension. Harvey has shown how advanced capitalism radically reconfigures our experience of space and time, by accelerating the flows of information, goods, and capital, to the point of creating a sensation of the annihilation of space by time.
Gursky’s photographs are the perfect visualization of this theory. His images precisely capture the places where this compression occurs: globalized stock exchanges, automated ports, delocalized industries, standardized tourist infrastructures. “Chicago Board of Trade” (1999) shows the frenetic agitation of a trading room where transactions take place at the speed of light. “Salerno” (1990) reveals a port where multicolored containers are piled up, symbols of accelerated global trade. “99 Cent” (1999) presents the global uniformity of mass consumption, with its infinitely reproduced shelves.
Harvey explains that this compression entails a destabilization of our identities, a feeling of disorientation and insecurity. Gursky’s photographs, with their disproportionate scale, their unreal sharpness, and their flattened perspective, precisely reproduce this sensation of vertigo. They do not merely show us capitalism, they make us feel its psychological effects.
Gursky’s immense industrial landscapes, such as “Nha Trang” (2004) where hundreds of Vietnamese workers manufacture furniture for IKEA, or “Greeley” (2002) showing an industrial cattle farm in the United States, document what Harvey calls “flexible accumulation”: the ability of capital to move instantaneously to exploit differential costs on a global scale. Human bodies appear there as mere variables of adjustment in a globalized system.
Harvey also analyzes how contemporary capitalism transforms space into a commodity, reducing places to their exchange value. Gursky’s photographs perfectly capture this commodification: natural landscapes are often presented as exploitable resources or playgrounds (“Engadin”, 2006), urban spaces as investments (“Shanghai”, 2000), even art appears as a speculative value (“Turner Collection”, 1995).
The standardization of spaces is another symptom of this spatio-temporal compression. In the international hotels, airports, or shopping centers that Gursky photographs, we no longer know where we are, so much do these non-places resemble each other from one continent to another. The local is erased in favor of a global uniformization that the photographer records with clinical precision.
Gursky’s work also exposes what Harvey calls “spatially fixed capital,” the massive investments in immobile infrastructures (roads, factories, shopping centers) that attempt to fix capital despite its tendency towards mobility. His photographs of solar power plants (“Les Mées”, 2016), highways, or industrial complexes reveal these spatial anchors of capital, raising the question of their permanence in a world in constant acceleration.
The terrifying beauty of our world
Gursky’s genius lies in the fact that he manages to make this analysis visually seductive, almost addictive. His images attract us with their extraordinary formal beauty, their chromatic richness, their rigorous structure, before revealing the horror of what they represent. There is something obscene in the aesthetic pleasure we feel in the face of these tableaux of our collective self-destruction.
Take “Bahrain I” (2005), with its racing circuit winding through the desert like a black velvet ribbon on golden sand. Or “F1 Pit Stop” (2007), this perfect choreography of a Formula 1 team in action. Or these photographs of raves where the dancers form abstract luminous patterns. These images are magnificent, while documenting fundamentally absurd activities in a world on the brink of collapse.
This tension between formal beauty and implicit critique makes Gursky a profoundly ambiguous artist. He is neither a pure aesthete nor an explicitly engaged activist. He presents the world as it is, in all its terrifying splendor, and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. It is this ambiguity that makes his work so powerful and so disturbing.
For Gursky understands a fundamental truth: to truly see the contemporary world, one must extract oneself from it. His images are not instants, but meticulous constructions, often assembled digitally from multiple shots. This is not manipulation, it is clarification. By freeing himself from the constraints of human vision, he allows us to see what we could never perceive otherwise.
This is why Gursky’s photographs are so large: they must physically engulf us to make us understand realities that surpass us. They function as corporeal experiences, environments in which we penetrate more than images that we observe from a distance.
When we stand before a Gursky, we feel like an insect facing a world that has become too vast, too complex, too fast to be grasped on a human scale. And that is perhaps the ultimate message of his work: we have created a world that surpasses us, that escapes us, that reduces us to insignificance. A world of which we are no longer the actors, but the powerless spectators.
Andreas Gursky is not just a photographer, he is a cartographer of the Anthropocene, an archivist of late capitalism, a lucid witness to our own disappearance as autonomous subjects. His images are the frescoes of our era, monuments that will remain when all else has disappeared.
And you, bunch of snobs, who marvel at his works in galleries and art fairs, know that you are not just contemplating photographs. You are looking at yourselves, in the magnifying and pitiless mirror that Gursky holds up to our civilization.
- Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Gallimard, Paris, 1975.
- Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989.
