|
Born in 1955, he grew up in Duesseldorf, the only child of a successful commercial photographer, learning the tricks of that trade before he had finished high school. At Essen, Gursky encountered photography's documentary tradition, a sophisticated art of unembellished observation, whose earnest outlook was remote from the artificial enticements of commercial work. There Gursky learned the ropes of the art world and mastered the rigorous method of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs had achieved prominence within the Conceptual and Minimal art movements. When Gursky, together with other Becher students, began to win recognition in the late 1980s, his photography was interpreted as an extension of his teachers' aesthetic. But the full range of Gursky's photographic educations has figured in his mature work, enabling him to outgrow all three of them. |
 |
For his commanding signature style has arisen from a risky process of experiment that draws upon a great diversity of images, ideas, and methods. In the late 1970s, he studied at the Folkwangschule in Essen, which Otto Steinert had established as West Germany's leading school of traditional photography. Beginning in the late 1950s, Bernd and Hilla Becher had developed a distinctive photographic aesthetic, devoted to the anonymous, neglected architecture of heavy industry. Their systematic, impersonal approach was alien to Steinert's Subjective Photography movement, but in the 1960s their work was embraced by adherents of the new Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Their rising prominence in the art world won Bernd Becher a professorship at the Kunstakademie in 1976. |
