White Cube is an extremely swish, commercial art gallery, with two branches in London, one each in New York, Paris and Seoul.

Currently showing at their Mason’s Yard gallery, just off Piccadilly, is a characteristically slick, antiseptic display of recent megaphotos by art photography superstar, Andreas Gursky. Let’s quote his Wikipedia article:

Born in Leipzig in 1955, Gursky is known for his large-scale colour photographs of architecture, landscapes and contemporary life—crowds, consumer goods and the infrastructures of global capitalism—combining methodical observation with digital construction to achieve an all-over, hyper-detailed image field. His works reach some of the highest prices in the art market. His photograph Rhein II was sold at Christie’s for $4,338,500 on 8 November 2011. At the time it was the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, and it remains the most expensive photograph by a living photographer. (In 2022 it was overtaken by Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece Le Violin d’Ingres, which sold for $12.4 million.)

All of which tends to confirm that modern art, before everything else, is about money. As Depeche Mode put it 42 years ago, ‘everything counts in large amounts’ and of few things is this more true than the billionaires’ investment category formerly known as ‘art’.

Here’s one of the pieces on display. This enormous image, over four years wide, is meant to be a lament for Germany’s endangered steel industry but maybe it could be retitled, ‘Multimillionaire artist sympathises with the working class’.

Glowing steel ingot in Thyssenkrupp, Duisburg, 2025 © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube

In the main ground-floor gallery I counted 4 enormous photos and 1 merely large one.

• Harry Styles on stage (enormous)
• Eco camp in trees (enormous)
• umbrellas under some kind of glass roof (enormous)
• 5 people standing in front of coloured boards on the wall (very big)
• toddler wearing a wolf t-shirt and wolf mask (large)

On the stairs towards the downstairs gallery, 2 large ones.

• full moon through mackerel clouds (large)
• woman holding a baby (large)

Downstairs in the lobby by the lifts, one massive one and 2 large.

• abstract black and chrome (massive)
• 2 of a woman creating a tower from Jenga bricks in a living room while wearing a cardboard box on her head (large)

In the main downstairs gallery 8 photos, 5 enormous and 3 merely large.

• footpath up a mountain (enormous)
• glacier curving between mountains (enormous)
• slab of hot metal in a factory furnace (enormous)
• modern curving office block (enormous)
• wide shot of a long 1960s style apartment block (enormous)
• gas cooker (large)
• electric cooker (large)
• towel in water (large)

Eighteen in total. Here’s the one depicting eco protestors who’d made a base in the woods.

Protestors in Lüzerath, 2023 © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube

Little and large

The fundamental thing to note is the differences in size. With the merely big photos you have to lean in to see the detail; with the supersized ones you have to step back to take in the overall composition and, once you’ve assimilated the sheer scale and shape, then probably go back close-up to appreciate the details. Here’s the massive one in the lift lobby space downstairs. I’ve no idea what it depicts.

Komori by Andreas Gursky © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025. Courtesy White Cube

Variety and similarity

The next thing to notice is the great variety of subject matter. A towel. A winding path up a mountain. A gas cooker. A modern office block. The moon through clouds. A woman in her front room.

It’s hard to avoid the sense of a very carefully, artfully staged randomness. A meticulous absence of themes or topics. Here’s the underwater towel. Gursky claims that someone dropped it in the bath and it made such a pretty image, with little bubbles of air escaping into the water, that he grabbed his camera and snapped it. A likely story! Nothing Gursky does is casual or contingent; everything is extensively (over)planned.

The underwater towel © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube

Maybe it was the austere and antiseptic setting of White Cube itself but, regardless of the ostensible subject matter, what all the images really conveyed to me was complete detachment. Clinical. It was like walking into an operating theatre of the imagination. Everything that enters Gursky’s field of composition is stripped of human feeling or overtone to become a kind of lesson or sermon. About what? Nothingness.

Installation view of Andreas Gursky @ White Cube showing (left) Harry Styles onstage and (right) the eco protest photo

And maybe not operating theatre. Maybe the lobby of a very expensive modern hotel, the kind which looks and feels identical, whether it’s in London, Paris, Beijing, Seoul. Completely spic and span antiseptic settings for vast, modern, soulless images, as transnational muzak plays in the background, oligarchs and oil sheikhs check in, as arms dealers and cartel bosses check take a coffee before their next business meeting.

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Between 1981 and 1987 Gursky studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Bernd Becher. Bernd was one half of the influential husband and wife duo credited with founding the Düsseldorf school of photography, apparently the biggest art movement in Germany since Bauhaus. The Bechers encouraged their students to bring a detached, dispassionate perspective to documentary photography – with the aim of creating a dis-enchanted vision of post-war Germany’s industrial landscapes and architecture.

And I think the calculated detachment of his style would have suited those early industrial subjects, once. But now, 40 years later, it feels like an incredibly professional, digitally-enhanced emptiness. It has become a slick mannerism.

Installation view of Andreas Gursky @ White Cube showing the curving modern office building (left) next to a winding glacier (right)

In many ways this display of enormous works reminded me of the Gilbert and George exhibition of enormous works which I recently went to at the Hayward Gallery. Gursky is 70, Gilbert is 82, George is 83. Curators kid themselves this is still ‘subversive’ or ‘innovative’ art. No it isn’t. It’s old white guy art, now.

Commentary on individual works

Harry Styles

I’ve mentioned the enormous image of Harry Styles onstage, shot from behind and wearing a striking outfit made of what looks like Christmas tree tinsel (it is, in fact, an outfit designed by Gucci, natch) so that his enormous silhouette at first glance blends in with the vast sea of faces in front of him.

It’s only when you look closer that you realise that every face in the crowd is defined with digital precision in a way that a normal photo would be incapable of. This is due to the way they’re made. These enormous photos are not, in fact, one photograph but a whole set of photographs of the same subject taken from different angles and stitched together. The planning, photographing and stitching take a long time. On average, Gursky finishes just three o these megaphotos a year.

Also, when you’re really close up, it hits you how the thousands of members of the audience are super-real, over-finished. Suddenly I wondered whether the whole thing was done by AI – or might as well have been.

Wife

Apparently Gursky’s been experimenting with taking photos with an iPhone. Wow. Down with the kids. That explains the presence, among the megaphotos, of the half dozen much more modest, sensibly-sized works here. For example, the paired images of his wife at home adding a piece to a tower of Jenga blocks, with a cardboard box on her head.

Installation view of Andreas Gursky @ White Cube showing the two photos of his wife making a tower of Jenga bricks (photo by the author) © Andreas Gursky

The domestic scene is banal. The cardboard box feels limply surreal, the kind of surrealism which was revived in the 1960s. It feels very dated, very so what. To be blunt all the smaller images were very meh. Like the nice but so what photo of the full moon in a sky of mackerel clouds.

Installation view of Andreas Gursky @ White Cube showing a full moon in a sky of mackerel clouds (photo by the author) © Andreas Gursky

iPhone, schmy-phone. It feels like his metier is the striking megaphotos. He invented these and no-one does them as well as him. The smaller (still pretty large) works, in my opinion, undermined and weakened the impact of the megaphotos by their banality.

Paris apartment block

Montparnasse II by Andreas Gursky (2025) © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025

This is an image of a 1960s apartment block in Paris. It has no fewer than with 1,122 windows. It was shot in winter, in a series of photographs of segments of the building shot from the hotel opposite then spliced together.

As I mentioned above, you have to step back and be quite a distance away to take in the scale and scope of the image. Then, when you move closer, you can see lots, hundreds, of details. The curators point out that many of the windows are open and you can see into hundreds of little lives. But what struck me is how unpeopled it is. There are, in fact, if you look closely, a dozen or so human beings pottering around the base of the building but they are irrelevant mannequins, tokens, like an architect’s models. The building and its environs have been dehumanised.

Same goes for the striking image of a steep rocky hillside which, you learn from the catalogue, is the Klausen Pass in the Swiss Alps. First you have to step back to take in the total composition. It’s only when you lean forwards that you realise that on the right-hand size there’s a narrow path winding up towards the rocky peak and, again, only if you look closer still do you realise there are hikers on it. Human beings, but reduced to near invisibility by the scale.

Klausen Pass II by Andreas Gursky (2025) © Andreas Gursky / DACS 2025

In the 3 or 4 images like this I felt that Gursky was depicting vast scales in which individual lives barely register and certainly don’t count.

Then and now

In the name of providing full information, I need to explain that a number of these images are returns to subjects he photographed some time ago.

Thus a stylishly blank antiseptic shot of a gas cooker, which was one of his first successful images back in 1980, has been redone using the same blank style but of an electric cooker hob.

The piece above is titled Klausen Pass II because it marks a return to the same location which he originally photographed in the 1980s.

Same with the huge sinuous glacier depicted four of five photos above, it’s a return to an Alpine glacier he first shot in 1993. The aim of reprising the landscape is to show the accelerating impact of climate change. Well OK but somehow his aesthetic of utter detachment makes it hard to care. And you wouldn’t have known or suspected this if you hadn’t read the accompanying catalogue and notes. It would just have been another huge landscape.

Comparison with Edward Burtyinski

In fact reading the catalogue section about documenting the effects of climate change jogged my memory and reminded me think of the awesome exhibition of almost equally supersized landscape photos by Edward Burtynski at the Saatchi Gallery. These are in a different class from Gursky’s because 1) they are genuinely polemical, systematically recording the devastation inflicted on landscapes around the world by all manner of 21st century over-farming, extraction and pollution; and 2) at the same time they are dazzlingly visually inventive, combining eco politics with a real feel for the abstract patterns to be seen in nature at scale. Here’s an example.

Salinas #2, Cádiz, Spain (2013) photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Flowers Gallery, London

Now we’re motoring! In my view, the Burtynski displays a higher order of aesthetic creativity and taste than Gursky’s deliberately blank, numb, dull, affectless images.

Yoko graffito

In the alleyway out of Mason’s Yard someone has created a Banksy-style life-sized graffito depicting Yoko Ono by a ladder. For me, this had more life and humanity and visual interest than all the Gurskies put together.

Yoko Ono graffito on the way out of Mason’s Yard (photo by the author)

Conclusion

This exhibition is free. Go and see it. Make up your own mind. But I didn’t like it.

Related links

• Andreas Gursky continues at White Cube Mason’s Yard gallery until 8 November
• Andreas Gursky website

Related reviews

• Andreas Gursky @ the Hayward Gallery (April 2018)
• Photography reviews