Gursky

Wow, Gursky! What a fantastic exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I loved the scale, I loved the patterns, but mostly I was entranced by the way he has increasingly used digital image manipulation to tell truths in a different way from the ‘truth’ of the unaltered image.

This picture of Tokyo from a train looks initially like one picture but is actually is a composite of different pictures and has multiple points of focus. But if you look, suddenly a house or a balcony, surrounded by crispness, is out of focus.

The Southbank website says: Gursky describes the relationship between construction, documentation and authenticity in his work as similar to the way that we might recall a landscape glimpsed from a moving vehicle: ‘You look out of the window and get an impression, but when you write it down it will be what you imagine’.

This take on photography is controversial but the link between an edited image and a piece of writing makes complete sense to me. (My own picture out of many).

Discussion welcome below!

Extras: inside the exhibition and outside.