“I want my motifs to look as though I could have photographed them anywhere. The places are not meant to be specifically described, but are meant to function more as metaphors. I am interested in global viewpoints in today's social utopias.”
—Andreas Gursky
James Bond Island I is a supreme example of Andreas Gursky’s uncanny and iconic photographic oeuvre. Executed on a monumental scale, the present work oscillates between reality and artificiality through the archetypal sublime perspective that has come to define the artist’s practice. James Bond Island I is part of a three-work series conceived in 2007 that employed aerial photographs of the Thai islands of Khao Phing Kan, which sit within the bay of Phang-Nga off the coast of Southern Thailand; these islands featured in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. The ominous, imposing volcanic archipelago juts out from the seemingly placid blue-grey sea, drawing the eye inexorably towards the horizon line which dissolves into misty clouds in the upper section of the image. Diagonal lines and jagged shapes become interwoven, verging on the abstract and seemingly suspended within the uncanny, waveless water. Characteristically, Gursky has placed an emphasis on form, colour and composition that sits at odds with the detailed clarity of the image, creating an otherworldliness and evoking a ‘distinctive and almost bizarre plasticity’.i In this sense, the present work epitomises the tension between the quasi-detached documentary impulse inherent to the photographic medium and the aesthetic sensitivity or creativity of the contemporary artist that defines Gursky’s practice.
In documenting the spectacle and spectacularity of the contemporary, capitalist age, Gursky often calls into question globalised consumerism. At the time of the film’s production, this constellation of islands was almost untouched. After its release, however, the remote area became a magnet for foreign tourists, a phenomenon of cultural and economic colonisation. Within his landscape practice in particular, Gursky embeds critique and irony as subjective viewpoints into the superficially detached photographic image, cynically examining the often problematic relationship between the human and natural in a manner akin to his contemporary Edward Burtynsky. As Aaron Schuman has written of the series, Gursky’s islands ‘elegantly critique the pursuit of escapism through commonly held fantasies of seclusion and paradise’.ii In the present work, Gursky secretes this critique within the microcosmic details of the image: on first glance, the islands appear untouched, pristine and timeless, defined by a strange stillness; on closer inspection, miniature boats leave vestigial traces on the sea’s surface, minute markers of human activity within the monumentality of the natural environment.
“I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.”
—Andreas Gursky
This blurring of the distinction between macro and microcosm is a hallmark of Gursky’s sublime imagery and ‘God’s-eye’ perspective. This can be traced back to his studies under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s; fellow students from this fruitful period include Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer. The Bechers employed elevated vantage points to document industrial relics such as cooling towers and furnaces, using a coolly detached lens to record locations in a straightforward and objective manner. In his oeuvre more broadly, Gursky propounds a similarly taxonomic expression of the Romantic Sublime by minimising the role and presence of humankind in relation to the natural world; here, his use of a towering perspective is a key formal device that aligns the contemporary viewer with the Rückenfigur familiar from the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. However, Gursky’s mature photographic practice deploys a highly complex interweaving of digital technology and visual structures that elevates his work in an idiosyncratic manner: ‘Since 1992 I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing, so as to emphasise formal elements that will enhance the picture, or, for example, to apply a picture concept that in real terms of perspective would be impossible to realise’.iii In this regard, Gursky’s photography is really a kind of image-making, akin to Jeff Wall’s ‘cinematographic’ practice in its reliance on artifice.
By using digital technology to knit together multiple planes and perspectives into a single, manipulated image, the artist covertly distorts photographic ‘reality’. As Ralph Rugoff has remarked, the subject matter of Gursky’s photographs is in fact secondary to their mode of presentation, and the careful mise-en-scène of their creation: ‘It’s not simply a matter of seeing reality as packaged goods, but of realising that our gaze itself is a kind of stylised container. At the moment, Gursky is one of our chief chroniclers of this look. Ostensibly, his camera surveys an eclectic range of subject matter: factories, seaports and air-cargo sites, dance clubs, landscapes, trading floors and shoe displays. But the real subject of his pictures is always the invisible bubble that our gaze sets upon the world’.iv As evinced by James Bond Island I, it is only due to the artist’s skill that formal and aesthetic concerns align perfectly within a compelling, relentless yet ultimately irresolvable image.
