Lot 547 D

"The world can seem richer and more generous in disclosing its meanings when we are freed from its pressing fullness to contemplate its fixed, flattened image on a piece of paper. The effect is all the more seductive when […] the photographer was already remote from the scene, whose antlike actors consequently seem all the more purposeful because blissfully unaware of the eye that regards them. Our Olympian detachment makes the familiar strange to us , and, like benign extraterrestrials who have unexpectedly encountered an inhabited planet, we study the view with disinterested curiosity, free equally of urgency and malice." (Peter Galassi, Gursky's world, in: Peter Galassi (ed.), Andreas Gursky, exhib.cat. Museum of Modern Art New York, New York 2001, p. 23)