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Craig Kalpakjian creates images of architectural interiors that do not exist. Using the resources of computer software, Kalpakjian achieves an eerie realism through simulated texture, light, and detail. Anonymous spaces are seen from curiously disembodied vantage points: an architecture of everywhere and nowhere in particular, seen by everyone. In Kalpakjian's landscape photographic precision masks a wholly artificial construct.
Andreas Gursky’s photographic vision is extraordinarily precise. Every image—whether of a Rhine landscape, rave dance floor, or factory interior —unfolds to reveal an intrinsic organizing principle. Teasing an eccentric geometry out of each of his subjects, Gursky reorders the world according to his own visual logic, accumulating myriad tiny details to offer a sense of harmonic coherence. There is a documentary impulse behind Gursky’s work, one inherited from his German forebears—August Sander, the early 20th-century encyclopedic chronicler of occupational typologies, and his own professors, Bernd and Hilla Becher, who systematically record architectural relics of the industrial age. Gursky’s subject matter is late-capitalist society and the systems of exchange that organize it, and his practice is equally totalizing and taxonomic. His pictures may be described as modern-day versions of classical history painting in that they reproduce the collective mythologies that fuel contemporary culture: travel and leisure (sporting events, clubs, airports, hotel interiors, art galleries), finance (stock exchanges, sites of commerce), material production (factories, production lines), and information (libraries, book pages, data). Large in scale and brilliantly lit, Gursky’s color photographs emulate the physicality of oil on canvas.
A Museum Tour
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