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We are alone on this planet. It is not a choice. Here we are. This is what everyone has to deal with.
(Andreas Gursky, 2001).

There are few people who haven't experienced the chill of isolation that can come in the face of modern life. It can creep into the heart at strange, even seemingly inappropriate moments: in the midst of a crowd; standing in front of an anonymous apartment block; or even trying to choose from a surfeit of products on department store shelves. All of a sudden, the sense of connectedness that makes our relationship with the world happy and intimate vanishes - and we feel small and alone.

Loneliness might seem an oddly depressing thing to mention in the context of Andreas Gursky's photographs. After all, he has produced some of the most gloriously abundant and charismatic images in contemporary art. However, beneath the seductive spectacle of his almost hypnotically detailed and monumentally scaled works (such as Montparnasse, 1993), there is - for me at least - an unsettling feeling...

Mind you, I'm not sure that the artist would entirely agree with me about this. Gursky considers distance - both physical and emotional - as a critical factor in his creative projects, giving us the space to 'recognize the hinges that hold the system together'. Indeed, his creative answer to the conundrum of being alone on this planet is impressively resolute. He chooses to grapple with creative and existential meaning by picturing the world in terms of 'clear structures [which are] ... the result of my desire, perhaps illusory, to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world'. As a consequence, Gursky's photographs alert us to systems - in nature, in mass gatherings of various kinds or with evidence of the invisible economic networks that underpin how modern societies work. There is a sense of order in the most seemingly random of his photographs, as if the earth and its human occupants are being reined in from chaos by a guiding, if slightly ironic, hand...
 
In the 1990s, Gursky's observational emphasis became more directed and ambitious as he was inspired by the various manifestations of global capitalism that guide and underpin so much of modern society. His interest was piqued, appropriately enough, when looking at a newspaper photograph of the crowded floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Gursky became fascinated by the dynamics of the 'new world order' with its networks of mass human activity shaped by intangible (but very real) economic factors. He began a prodigious itinerary of world travel in pursuit of subjects revealing the underlying patterns of a fast-paced, high-tech, and largely nameless and faceless contemporary world.

... If the old adage 'the world is as you see it' is true, then it has to be said that how Gursky perceives that reality is highly distinctive.  One of my favourite quotes from the artist is his description of himself as an 'extraterrestrial being' viewing planet earth from above to untangle its perplexing manifestations.  Strangely enough, there is a similarity between Gursky's bird's-eye perspective and many of the photographs on the copper disc of images sent on the Voyager's journeys into deep space. Created to describe life on earth to some far-distant alien viewer, these photographs often adopted an elevated perspective focusing attention on the dizzying variety and inherent patterning of human social organisations...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.