“I have progressed. Axel Hutte, Thomas Struth or Candida Hofer, for example, still all work on specific subjects for certain periods. But in my case I don’t distinguish between one area and the next - for me it’s much more of a slow process. But I also think that if you compare me to Thomas Ruff, you can see that he has moved on as well because what he is doing is maybe more like the work of a scientist who is trying to find out what the essence of photography is.” - Andreas Gursky
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While this presentation of photos from North Korea offers nothing new really (in terms of the kinds of imagery it presents), I did, however, learn one thing: I always thought of those cards that people are holding to create large-scale mosaics as pixels. In fact, I was so convinced that there were pixels that I never bother to look more closely at Andreas Gursky’s photos. However, as you can see above (I cut out a small region and blew it up), these cards (or pieces of paper or whatever they are) contain smaller units! So creating those mosaics doesn’t just require someone pixelating some image and then producing uniform cards, it means producing quite a few very specific cards that can only be used in their correct positions. That’s a mind-blowingly absurd effort in a country where most people don’t even have enough to eat!
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A common complaint about a photographer’s new work is that it’s a mere repetition of older work. As an illustration, I am using a photo from Gregory Crewdson’s new work, but that’s really just an arbitrary choice. I could have easily picked something from Andreas Gursky’s latest work, say - whose Chelsea show got attacked in the press for that very same reason: We’ve seen this before, we want something new.
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