Painterly precision

Andreas Gursky's retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is that rare thing, an exhibition that excels on every level. You don't need an MA in critical theory to appreciate his big, bold, incredibly detailed photographs, but besides their populist appeal - their undoubted wow factor - they are complex works that have already inspired a wealth of theoretical analysis and pushed the boundaries technically and aesthetically. His work invites audience engagement, sparking impromptu debates between strangers as they try to figure out how on earth he does it, and tease out its myriad implications.

Your response to this may well be "Andreas Who?", because we have seen relatively little of Gursky in this country (though he did feature in Limerick's EVA and he is represented in the Tate collection). Simply put, he makes photographs that are printed on a near-cinematic scale, often featuring huge numbers of people in epic architectonic or natural settings.

His views of a boxing stadium, a race track, a stock exchange, an apartment building, the atrium of a vast hotel or hundreds of skiers, give us a god's-eye view of humanity as so many ants, busily swarming. The terms globalisation and global village inevitably come to mind in relation to his work.

He doesn't, though, simply set out to wow us with scale. His work needs to be big to accommodate the exceptional level of detail, and to explore the ramifications of this detail.

One characteristic reaction to his images is a kind of shock as the human scale falls away into insignificance, and individuality dissolves into a collective identity. It is easy to deduce who his art-historical antecedents might be, from the teeming landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel, for example, to an oft-cited influence, the sublime, mystically-charged landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955, but within a year the family moved to Essen and then on to Dusseldorf. Both his parents ran a family commercial photography business that flourished with the German economic revival. You could say that photography was in Gursky's blood. He learnt the business from the inside out as he grew up, becoming technically adept and even featuring as a model in some of his father's pictures. It also encouraged his pragmatic approach to photography: he later juggled commercial assignments with fine art work.

However, in keeping with his generation's distrust of the new materialistic Germany, like many another disaffected teenager, he felt alienated from his parents' values. He opted out of military service, working as a health care assistant instead, and considered going on to make a career in that area before changing his mind and enrolling in Essen's Folkwangschule, which had a prestigious photographic department.

In the catalogue of the exhibition, (distributed here by Thames & Hudson at £42 sterling), MOMA's Peter Galassi details how Gursky arrived at the school at a transitional time, in the late 1970s. He began his studies there influenced by the formalism of Otto Steinert's Subjective Photography movement, and by the dominant, anecdotal art photography aesthetic of Henri CartierBresson - whose conception of the photographer as a hunter on the prowl, Leica to hand, ever alert to "the decisive moment" in the flow of daily life, has had an irresistible appeal for generations of photographers and still yields fruitful results.

As against this there was the almost anti-aesthetic objectivity exemplified by Bernd and Hilla Becher (some of whose extraordinary work has been seen here at IMMA), which was fast gaining ground. Their longterm programme was to document usually defunct industrial buildings in large-format, ultra-sharp black and white images, with a precision and taxonomic zeal that one could, if a little unfairly, label Teutonic.

Their precursor was August Sander, and if it all sounds as dry as dust you might be surprised at just how visually compelling photographs of old factories can be. It was, in fact, the Minimalist and Conceptualist artists and audience of the 1970s who tuned into the Bechers' chilly aesthetic. The Bechers, though, were not the only advocates of this "objective" style. Many American photographers were also important as exemplars.

When Gursky went on to the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf to continue his studies in 1980 (he had tried and failed to get a job as a photojournalist), under the apprenticeship system of the academy, Bernd Becher became his personal tutor. As teachers, the Bechers encouraged their students to apply themselves to projects as precise and rigorous as their own.

Gursky, working in colour, made studies of security guards at the reception desks of huge office blocks - the latter forming the material for his first exhibition, in 1987.

In fact, though, Gursky had completed the series in 1984, and felt he had personally exhausted his commitment to the Bechers' strict methodology. His recourse was an almost literal compromise between the Bechers' approach and the Leica. He went roaming with a hand-held intermediate format camera. Among the people he admired at the time was the Canadian Jeff Wall, who makes staged photographic tableaux, in light boxes, that have been widely influential.

What happened next is like something out of Antonioni's film Blow- Up. On holiday in Switzerland, Gursky was asked by a companion to take a picture of Klausenpass, which he did, and thought nothing more about it. Then, as Galassi recounts it, at home, "six months later, when he enlarged the negative, he was excited to find scattered across the landscape the tiny figures of hikers whose presence the photographer, unlike his camera, had failed to register at the time."

Like Craig Raine's "Martian" poetry, Gursky's subsequent panoramic views of people at leisure employ an eerily distanced, "extraterrestrial" (as he observed himself) viewpoint. They are intricate, detached accounts of phenomena that are both familiar and yet made strange.

Chance played a part again in 1990, when a newspaper photographer of the Tokyo stock exchange caught his eye, just as he was considering a trip to Japan, and he decided to make his own photograph of the exchange. Fascinatingly, the picture he made - as with many others that followed - recall the overall compositions of Jackson Pollock, albeit made up of a mass of humanity rather than a mass of paint marks. Gursky implicitly acknowledged this when he went on to photograph a Pollock.

Like Jeff Wall, who consciously set out to be the equivalent of a history painter for his time, Gursky was - and is - very conscious of his work in relation to painting. Inevitably, there is a view of it as being in competition with painting, but it is more accurate to say that it pursues a lively and rewarding dialogue with painting.

His view of a grid-patterned apartment block in Montparnasse, for example, is a dead ringer for a painted geometric abstract. A few years ago I got into conversation with someone who had seen this image on view at the Liverpool Tate, said that he hadn't seen Gursky's photographs but had seen one of his paintings, and refused point-blank to believe that he had seen not a painting but a photograph.

It is true that Gursky uses photography in a painterly way in, for example, his unhesitating recourse to digital manipulation. That image of the apartment block began life as two photographic negatives which were scanned, seamlessly joined pixel by pixel and then reconverted into a single negative. Similarly, he dispensed with a whole group of buildings in another work because he didn't want them appearing in his view of the Rhine.

While, as Galassi says, "Gursky is among the first artists to have used the new technology to make something genuinely new", he is not averse to more primitive methods of intervention. On one occasion, seeing the opportunity for a picture from the Autobahn, he pulled in and set up his tripod. But by the time he was ready, the cows grazing in a nearby field, crucial to his pictorial intentions, had wandered away. Undaunted, he got into his car, took the nearest exit, rounded up the uncooperative cows and herded them back to where he wanted them. Perhaps neither Cartier-Bresson nor the Bechers would approve, but then the key to Gursky's success seems to be that he has found his own third way.

The Andreas Gursky retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, continues until May 15th