The German photographer Andrea Gursky is a photographer born in the 50s who photographs using large format film photographing architecture and landscape colour photographs. The studio that gursky works in was was refurbished from an old electricity station in 2001 but now he shares it with some other photographers called Thomas Ruff, Laurenz Berges and Axell Hütte. Some of Gursky most famous and expensive work is in some of the biggest art and photography gallerias in the world, one of his best which sold for 3 million dollars back in 1999. As seen in the photographs below, most of his photographs are taken from a high point of view, which he takes from a cranes and helicopters all over the place, which I find very interesting and strange as most big photographers take their photos from ground height.
What drew me to Gurskys work in the the first place is the architecture work that he mostly does from a higher eye level because it allows us to view things especially buildings from a different view and he also makes the image looks proportional to the eyes. Some of his elements that he has used in his photography is a mix of non man made places or objects but mostly architecture photography. my overall opinion of Andrea Gurskys work is that his architecture work isn't taken from different view point compared to other photographers (ground level), also his images almost looked like they have been repeated consistently to emphasis on the scale of the buildings an makes them effective. The most interesting aspect to me which I wish to incorporate in my own work are the shapes that are created like the straight and curved lines through out his work. In addition, the colours of his photographs are exposed to a high level of saturation and different colours which make the images more exciting to look at.
I used two images of the same building that took from both ends and then used Photoshop to bring them together. However, I liked the way that the building has been manipulated and has more of an interesting architect. For further experimentation I would like to create different architecture using photographs.
My main focus when taking these images was to think more about the composition. To do this I took more time thinking about the framing of the images before taking a picture. By putting more time into thinking about each image, I composed the images from certain angles to show repetition and symmetry. Another thing I wanted to focus on showing in all the images, was the textures of the materials used in the buildings and structures. To accomplish this I edited some of the images into black and white, to make the tones of the textures stand out more and then I increased the definition of the images, to emphasise the smoothness or roughness of the textures. This worked really well in the images of the rough brick, compared to the smooth windows and window frames.