Andreas Gursky - 'The pure joy of seeing'

There was a fantastic photograph doing the rounds of social media a few days ago.  It involved an image from a Chelsea versus Spurs football match at Stamford Bridge.  The Spurs midfielder Dele Alli had just scored an incredible goal to put his team 2-1 up, and had decided to launch his celebrations right in front of a set of Chelsea fans.  The contrast between the willowy midfielder and the rival supporters that he goads is at first hilarious and then mesmerising.  Each of the individuals in the crowd cause you to focus and before you know it, you start to muse on their lives and motivations.  The man in the bottom left of the photograph, cupping a hot drink and sporting a half-smile, deciding that to raise a finger or vent a single expletive is pointless and absurd, is my favourite.  But there's also the deeply unimpressed woman just right of centre, electing to use both hands so that she can give Alli the double 'bird'.  And the hirsute man in the light blue sweater seemingly being held back by a friend, or the strange, unsettling boy staring dead ahead making you wonder if he's been dropped in from a different photograph.  I love the totality of this image.    
  

Steven Paston's image of Dele Alli taunting Chelsea fans

In a flippant mood and playfully courting hyperbole, I had described it as 'high art'.  But the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that this was exaggeration.  Would it, for instance, have looked out of place in the incredible Andreas Gursky exhibition that I had seen at the newly reopened Hayward Gallery last month?  Gursky, one of the world's great photographers is know for his enormous and spectacular images that contain a vast array of detail - sometimes people, sometimes not - that often leave the viewer breathless and overwhelmed.  They celebrate, in his own words, 'the pure joy of seeing'.  I certainly felt the Dele Alli image fitted that bill.  Would it, though, have benefited from being blown up to a massive scale, a size that allowed us to focus on each of those striking individuals, giving us the opportunity to hone carefully in on the absurdity and variety of their anger?  Notwithstanding the quickfire necessity required to capture this photograph - the German is not a spontaneous snapper - would it have held its own alongside Gursky's monumental masterpieces? 

The subject matter of the Dele Alli photograph is quite different from any of Gursky's images.  However, the dynamic that the viewer employs has similarities.  The one that immediately springs to mind was my second favourite from the exhibition, and the one that had given me the greatest pause, as I hovered in front of it for some fifteen minutes.  Paris, Montparnasse (1993) is a vast, stitched together photograph of an ordinary housing block in the French capital.  From seven or eight feet away you are able to view the whole, but as you start to encroach you find yourself honing in on each individual apartment and, lo and behold, there's lots going on in many of them. 

Paris, Montparnasse (1993)

Some of the residents, rather unsettlingly, seem to be staring right back at the photographer. This causes you to almost plant your nose up against each individual window, snooping voyeuristically around the interior and trying to imagine, Lloyd Grossman like, 'Who lives in a house like this?' And then moving backwards, these singular lives retreat and are subsumed into the whole again.

Directly opposite the block of Parisian flats was a more sobering photograph, topically so, as on the day that I viewed it the UK arm of Toys 'R' Us, one of the two companies featured in it, had gone into liquidation. Even without that news, there is something incredibly joyless about this image. The cartoon colours of the toy shop's logo seem absurd and are almost utterly engulfed by the 'asylum' white that washes over the whole. Viewed from the motorway there's a real sense of the transitory that would have been there even without the company's British demise.

 

Toys 'R' Us (1999)

The entertainment factor - and this is one of the reasons that I love Gursky - had certainly dropped with this photograph.  But it was swiftly resurrected by the wonderfully ironic Rückblick (2015).  Here we have four different German Chancellors (all added digitally) gazing at a Barnett Newman painting (the puff of smoke from Helmut Schmidt's cigarette is a gloriously witty touch).  I even tried my own playful take on this arresting image, choosing to step well back and capture a photograph of a gallery-goer taking a photograph of a photograph that featured four politicians gazing at a piece of art.  Take that, Jean Baudrillard!

Rückblick (2015)

The drama was about to heighten even further though.  Turning the corner of one of the upper rooms, and catching from an oblique angle the sudden glimpse of grey and green, meant I was now in the presence of the most expensive photograph ever sold.  A print of Rhein II (1997) had been sold at auction a few years ago for £2.7 million.  The contrarian in me, of course, wanted to hate it.  The contrarian didn't get a look in.  Immediately I was taken back to 2008 and the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern.  Having only ever encountered Rothko's works in prints, reduced massively in size, I'd not been prepared for their impact in the flesh.  They bowled me over and left me utterly punch-drunk.   Rhein II did something similar, and not just in its impact.  It actually reminded me of Rothko.  It's got that same paradoxical quality of being immensely soothing and quietly unsettling.  Again, like approaching a Rothko up close and seeing that quality of 'paint as subject', here you get to focus on the dapples of grey estuary bound water and individual blades of damp grass; and then - it's a perennial with Gursky - you retreat and are calmly overwhelmed by the whole.  Sky, land and water, just out of the void.  It's almost biblical.    

Rhein II (1999) 

There are problems, or rather contentions, with this photograph, as there are with many of Gursky's images.  The elephant in the room in the shape of a hulking power station that stands on the opposite bank of this image, and which has been digitally removed, raises questions about photography as art that are not easily dismissed.  However, that a painter, for instance, can choose not to include something in their field of vision seems to me to legitimatise Gursky's decision, and notwithstanding that photography is a medium that fundamentally testifies to truth, the aesthetic achievement of those glorious bands of green and grey demand a round of applause.  Besides, as Keats wrote 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'.        

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (1997)

Rhein II and the closing lines of 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' do seem a very long way from the photograph of Dele Alli and those splenetic Chelsea fans, though.  But not that far: there is still a sense of the democratic in that wonderful photograph that you find in almost all of Gursky's images, and certainly those that feature human-beings.  For better or worse he photographs people, often unwittingly, often uninhibited, like the stock-brokers in Chicago Mercantile Exchange (1997), or, with uniqueness and inhibitions quieted by toil, in the famous photograph of workers at a factory in Vietnam.  The dynamic of all these photographs are the same, an incredibly dramatic duality.  Each individual, or part, reels you in and is suddenly alive and unique.  But then, as your eyes widen and journey back out to the periphery, the whole story, ostensibly simple, is once again apparent. 

Postscript: Such was the intensity of this exhibition, that it took me around forty-five minutes to even register that this was my first visit to the Hayward since its overhaul and reopening.  What had changed?  Not much, other than the general direction of travel which appeared to be widdershins rather than clockwise.  And I think I might have read somewhere that the floor is different.  Do let me know if I've overlooked something though?