Lot Essay
Prada I is one of the most famous of photographer Andreas Gursky's images. These have become seminal touchstones in the canon of contemporary art, his dispassionate gaze allowing him to reveal to the viewer the strange beauty and mystery that underpins our existence. Be it in his landscapes, in his factory interiors or in his views of shop displays, Gursky manages to hint at the hermetic harmonies that give grace and order to our lives. This is all the more the case in the pared-back and restrained Prada I, where Gursky has celebrated the minimalist aesthetic of this contemporary consumerist altar, the vast scale of this picture immersing us as though within a landscape, allowing this shop display to acquire a rhythmic quality that borders on abstraction, recalling Warhol's iconic cans of Campbell's Soup.
Gursky is fascinated by the human experience and the human environment in our modern world and chronicles it in his iconic images. Executed in 1996, Prada I may display no overt human presence, yet there is all the same the implication of commerce and, in the presence of the shoes, of movement. They also provide an intriguing insight into man-made notions of beauty. Indeed, as fetishised objects of beauty, these shoes have been presented and lit as though they were art objects, Gursky creating an intriguing parallel to his photographs of public art galleries from the same period. This equivalency, between the world of the museum and that of the Prada store, is heightened by the Judd-like, Minimalist feel of the display of these shoes, an aspect accentuated in the following year's Prada II, where the shelves are shown empty.
The rigid regularity and formality of this display are heightened by Gursky's frontal perspective; he has here eschewed the almost bird's eye view he uses with some larger motifs, yet the nature of the interior shot means that the subject nonetheless fills the entirety of the picture surface. Gursky has accentuated the formality of this display through digital means as well, extending the shelves in order to increase the emphasis upon the composition's horizontality. Prada I dates from a period during which Gursky was increasingly relying on digital interventions in order not only to sharpen, but also to manipulate, his images. Here, the Prada display has not only been extended, but has also been amalgamated: the shoes on display are from different seasons, Gursky smuggling in a disruptive hint of the ephemeral nature of fashion that also introduces that traditional notion in still life: the memento mori. At the same time, he has deliberately undermined what used to be assumed: the veracity of photography. Gursky, in undermining the credibility of his own medium of choice, has also opened up whole new plateaux of representation, granting himself free rein to add a hint of subjectivity to his depictions of the hidden orders of everyday life.
Gursky is fascinated by the human experience and the human environment in our modern world and chronicles it in his iconic images. Executed in 1996, Prada I may display no overt human presence, yet there is all the same the implication of commerce and, in the presence of the shoes, of movement. They also provide an intriguing insight into man-made notions of beauty. Indeed, as fetishised objects of beauty, these shoes have been presented and lit as though they were art objects, Gursky creating an intriguing parallel to his photographs of public art galleries from the same period. This equivalency, between the world of the museum and that of the Prada store, is heightened by the Judd-like, Minimalist feel of the display of these shoes, an aspect accentuated in the following year's Prada II, where the shelves are shown empty.
The rigid regularity and formality of this display are heightened by Gursky's frontal perspective; he has here eschewed the almost bird's eye view he uses with some larger motifs, yet the nature of the interior shot means that the subject nonetheless fills the entirety of the picture surface. Gursky has accentuated the formality of this display through digital means as well, extending the shelves in order to increase the emphasis upon the composition's horizontality. Prada I dates from a period during which Gursky was increasingly relying on digital interventions in order not only to sharpen, but also to manipulate, his images. Here, the Prada display has not only been extended, but has also been amalgamated: the shoes on display are from different seasons, Gursky smuggling in a disruptive hint of the ephemeral nature of fashion that also introduces that traditional notion in still life: the memento mori. At the same time, he has deliberately undermined what used to be assumed: the veracity of photography. Gursky, in undermining the credibility of his own medium of choice, has also opened up whole new plateaux of representation, granting himself free rein to add a hint of subjectivity to his depictions of the hidden orders of everyday life.