Photos don't go bigger than mine': the epic, impossible images of the great Andreas Gursky

"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."

"In 2011, Gursky's 1999 colour photograph Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river flowing across flat fields near Dusseldorf, stunned auctioneers when it fetched $4.3m (2.7m), almost double its estimate, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. How do you deal with a thing like that? he says. Rhein II held that record until 2022, when it was overtaken by Man Ray's surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d'Ingres, which went for $12.4 million."

"Gursky's 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's pictures have been likened to paintings. The scale is crucial: They're really done as big as I can, he says. You can't get bigger technically."

Andreas Gursky began with black-and-white handheld landscapes and shifted in the 1990s to large-scale, color panoramas created by digitally stitching multiple photographs. He captures detailed scenes of stock exchanges, factories, Amazon warehouses, discount stores, sporting events and crowds. His works achieved high market value and even appeared in luxury retail settings. In 2011 Rhein II sold for $4.3m, setting a record later surpassed in 2022 by Man Ray's Le Violin d'Ingres. Gursky typically completes about three major works per year, often spending years on complex, multi-location stitching to produce images with painterly scale.

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