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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy works,\u201d he recalls, \u201cwere selling for more and more.\u201d In fact, his rising status in the art world was reflected in his photographs inside Prada and Gucci stores \u2013 the former was taken while he was waiting for his wife, who was shopping there. Then, in 2011, Gursky\u2019s 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (\u00a32.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold<\/a>. \u201cHow do you deal with a thing like that?\u201d he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray\u2019s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d\u2019Ingres, which went for $12.4 million.<\/p>\n Angela Merkel didn\u2019t want to be shot from behind. I guess it wasn\u2019t a very charming offer<\/p>\n Gursky\u2019s huge works are incredibly complex, often taking several years to complete. On average, he finishes three a year. He makes them by taking a series of pictures, sometimes at different locations, then suturing the parts he feels fit together into one single, impossible image. Given their ambition, their complexity and their scale, Gursky\u2019s pictures have been likened to paintings. The scale is crucial: \u201cThey\u2019re really done as big as I can,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t get bigger technically.\u201d People may not realise how much effort goes into making them \u2013 does that bother him? He shrugs.<\/p>\n \u2018How do you deal with a thing like that?\u2019 \u2026 Gursky with Rhein II, then the world\u2019s most expensive photograph. Photograph: Joerg Koch\/DDP\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n We are speaking via Zoom but a week later we meet at White Cube Mason\u2019s Yard in London, where he is installing his new exhibition. There is an entourage of technicians and assistants buzzing around. Although the exhibition includes just 16 pieces, Gursky says: \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever presented such different types of work.\u201d<\/p>\n It was all planned this way, though. The show features Gas Cooker, one of his earliest works. Dating from 1980, the shot gives a slightly elevated view of the hob at his student flatshare, its three rings eerily illuminated. Another image shows German activists in trees protesting against the destruction of a village, their sign in German saying: \u201cThe view from here is shit.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a new, melancholic image of a glowing steel ingot, a swansong to the Rhine\u2019s precarious steel industry. And then there\u2019s one of Gursky\u2019s first iPhone pictures, a playful diptych of his wife at home adding a block to a tower of Jenga, with a box on her head. In short, this show reveals other sides to the German artist, more tender, intimate and spontaneous \u2013 quite a contrast to the distant observer, the mass-scale creator.<\/p>\n I was under huge pressure to create for the exhibition \u2013 then an image fell into my lap<\/p>\n A few months ago, he called gallerist Jay Joplin and asked to postpone the show. \u201cHe said, \u2018No way, no deal \u2013 I\u2019ve given you the best date in the whole year. You have to cope and get it done.\u2019\u201d So he made 10 new pictures for the show. \u201cThat\u2019s a lot for the way I work.\u201d<\/p>\n For someone who has spent most of his career meticulously constructing images that couldn\u2019t exist, Gursky, now 70, seems to take delight in the simplicity of the iPhone. The exhibition includes several smaller-scale, more diaristic snapshots, from a newborn family member to a folded towel fallen into a bath. Shot from above, the towel seems suspended in space, with bubbles of water around its still folded form. Get up close and you can see the pixels fuzzing at the edges.<\/p>\n A swansong to industry \u2026 a glowing steel ingot in Thyssenkrupp, Duisburg, 2025. Photograph: \u00a9 Andreas Gursky \/ DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube<\/p>\n It sounds like the kind of thing only a hugely famous artist could get away with. But it underlines what Gursky has always been interested in: how we see the world in photographic fragments. \u201cThe towel fell into the bathtub by mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cUnderwater, it looked like magical realism. I just loved the way it looked. I was under huge pressure to create for the exhibition, then an image fell into my lap. I pressed click and there it was.\u201d<\/p>\n The towel appears next to another new image: a remake of a quintessential work made in 1993. He says the new shot is better. It depicts an apartment building with 1,122 windows in Paris. The new version consists of several pictures taken in winter, meaning the sun wasn\u2019t too glaring and the curtains were mostly open, allowing dozens of tiny vignettes into people\u2019s lives. As you move closer, more and more details emerge \u2013 you could spend hours looking at it. But move back and it\u2019s a gorgeously rich abstract expressionist piece, a composition of squares, from black to pastel-coloured.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about the inner life of the building,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a panopticon of habits, tastes, and how people like to furnish their flats.\u201d It\u2019s also a paradox of an image \u2013 the picture gives a view of almost the whole building, which would be impossible to see in reality. It is the result of a series of photographs of segments of the building, shot from the hotel opposite then spliced together.<\/p>\n Shame about the view \u2026 protestors in L\u00fczerath, 2023. Photograph: \u00a9 Andreas Gursky \/ DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube<\/p>\n Side by side, the two pictures show how far-ranging Gursky\u2019s interests and influences are. Another new work is sure to cause a bit of excitement: a picture of a famous English pop star. He won\u2019t reveal who, although they met through Joplin. The musician was a fan of Gursky while the photographer, in turn, had \u201cnever heard of him\u201d. Still, they became friends and Gursky accompanied the star on tour. The picture is taken from behind the musician as he performs in a glittering Gucci ensemble. Beyond is the stadium crowd, a sea of shimmering, cheering, screaming faces and iPhones. Gursky once asked Angela Merkel if he could shoot an image from a similar vantage point but the former German chancellor refused. \u201cI guess,\u201d he says, \u201cit wasn\u2019t a very charming offer \u2013 to photograph her from behind.\u201d<\/p>\n When we speak via Zoom, Gursky remembers an evening he spent in the pub with his then fellow student Thomas Ruff<\/a>, when both were at the fabled Kunstakademie in D\u00fcsseldorf. A respected German art dealer walked up to them and declared: \u201cYou guys are going to be famous!\u201d Gursky says: \u201cAt the time, I couldn\u2019t have imagined I would become an artist and that I would exclusively devote my life to photography.\u201d<\/p>\n Komori by Gursky, which features in the show. Photograph: \u00a9 Andreas Gursky \/ DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube<\/p>\n Gursky speaks from his vast, bright studio in D\u00fcsseldorf, where he has been based since those 1980s student days. He shares the building, a former electricity factory, with Ruff, as well as artists Laurenz Berges and Axel H\u00fctte. The building has been transformed over the decades they\u2019ve been there by architects Herzog & de Meuron<\/a>, who designed Tate Modern in London. There\u2019s now a gallery there that houses some of Gursky\u2019s art collection. \u201cIt\u2019s mostly German artists from the Rhineland area,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Gursky is one of the world\u2019s most feted photographic artists. You could almost say his success seems preordained: his grandfather Hans and his father Willy were both successful commercial photographers who trained him in the techniques of advertising photography from a young age. When he got to art school, he says, \u201cI have to admit there were advantages. I was very familiar with the technique \u2013 but it was also an enormous disadvantage, as I was shaped by the aesthetics of advertising photography. I had to lose that along the way, somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n