Artist Worksheet

Andreas Gursky
99 Cent

Andreas Gursky attended the Folkwangschule, Essen school from 1978 to 1980. After failing to find work as a photojournalist, he entered the prestigious Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, in 1980. After the first year of foundation coursework, he studied photography.

Andreas Gursky was born on January 15, 1955 in Leipzig, East Germany. He had a normal life and his parents ran a commercial photography studio, but Andreas did not seriously consider following their career path.

While in school, he worked as a taxi driver. After failing to find work as a photojournalist he started studying photography. After setting up a color darkroom with friends he always worked in color and he started taking detailed photographs of people doing leisure activities near landscapes.

Andreas Gursky did not work in other artistic mediums. He is a photographer partly because of his parent even though he wasn’t interested at first and mostly because he failed at finding work as a photojournalist. Andreas is inspired by his photography teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher because they taugh him about architecture and Andreas’s photographs are large scaled and a lot of them are of buildings and other landscapes. A hardship that he faced would be him not getting a job as a photojournalist but that led to a successful career as a photographer.

I chose this image because of the colors and the vivid details. I would describe Gursky’s photography style to be very detailed images that are large because he takes pictures of grand places but shows a lot of detail. I am planning on recreating this on a smaller scale or just focus on one spot of the store that has an interesting look. I plan on taking as many shots as I can so at least a few will be great. I will go to different stores and find good angles and good spots with interesting colors and designs.