£2.7 million

Rhein II by Andreas Gursky Sold for $4.3 Million

A sludgy image of the grey Rhine under grey skies, by the German artist Andreas Gursky, has sold for $4.3m (£2.7m) at a Christie's auction in New York, setting a new world record for a photograph.
The desolate featureless landscape shown in Rhine II is no accident: Gursky explained in an interview that it is his favourite picture: "It says a lot using the most minimal means … for me it is an allegorical picture about the meaning of life and how things are."
In fact the artist carefully digitally removed any intrusive features – dog walkers, cyclists, a factory building – until it was bleak enough to satisfy him.
Christie's described it as "a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship to nature on the cusp of the 21st century".
The buyer of the huge glass-mounted 350cm x 200cm (80in x 140in) print is unknown, but other Gursky works hang in the collections of major museums including Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The previous record for a photograph was paid for a 1981 print by the American Cindy Sherman, who is also the subject of all her own works.


 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/11/andreas-gursky-rhine-ii-photograph


 It seems a lot of work was involved. There are a number of places along the River Trent where one could capture an equally bleak image without recourse to Photoshop.

Just because it pleases me.

Publish Post

Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Exercise - Positioning a point.

To explore the consequences of positioning a single point within the frame -

St. Valery sur Somme. Canon EOS 60D. f11 @ 1/320 55mm

 

Although we see a couple of boats in middle distance, I would suggest that the essence of this image is the boy running into the frame from the right, giving us a point close to the edge. He is looking into (and sprinting towards) the centre of the picture, which gives a sense of anticipation and dynamism. The red clothing draws the eye straight to him as it contrasts with the otherwise relatively subdued hues of the rest of the image.

The Ulster Tower, Thiepval. Olympus E-1   f7.1 @ 1/200 22mm

                                  


The subject  here is clearly the white tower. Although "placing a point in the centre very rarely works" I think it is quite effective here. Central positioning is claimed to produce a static image; I would argue that this is entirely appropriate for a very solid and fixed memorial tower. It may be that the staticity is here relieved by the lines of the road and hedgerow leading the eye to the centre.

Lochnagar Memorial, La Boiselle. Olympus E-1   f9 @ 1/320 11mm

Third option - a little off-centre... I would agree that this composition is less static than in the centrally focussed example above, although again other factors contribute. The foreground is rising towards the cross, and the poppy wreaths also provide a subtly powerful line leading the eye in. The vertical of the cross divides the image in approximately one-third : two-thirds proportions. One may feel that the visual weight on the cross is balanced by the plateau of wreaths.



I think this exercise has helped to illustrate the visual consequences of choices made with simple compositional elements.

Elements of Design - or "photographer's block", as we call it round here...

Exercise One - Positioning a single point in the frame.

Sounds easy, doesn't it... can an image be simpler, assuming that it has anything visible at all?

But this, and the next exercise with TWO points of interest in the frame, has seen me completely stalled for weeks.

It isn't really photographer's block, because I have taken thousands of pictures over this period - a week in Northern France provided a wealth of subjects, and I am very pleased with many of the results; this week I have taken many images of Kate's impressive performance in an Alan Ayckbourn, again with quite good results given the dreadful lighting in the hall. No - it seems to be specifically "student photographer's block".

I have read the exercise brief a hundred times. I have gone out looking for suitable subjects, and even pressed the shutter quite a few times. I have moved on to the later exercises, and had a fair crack at them, with a number of blog entries sitting in draft form, but any meaningful progress seems to have been sunk in a profound crisis of confidence.

Must try harder, or something...

A laid-back nightmare vision...

Often asked "why do you have so many books?"

Appropriate reply may be "Why do you have so few...?"