Andreas Gursky: Long Shot Close Up - Art Lives

Andreas Gursky is a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view. Often likened to paintings, his photographs reflect a fascination with the ways people live in the world and how their existence impacts their surroundings. Filmmaker, Jan Schmidt-Garre, accompanied Gursky for two years as he created his famous work, Hamm, Bergwerk Ost , documenting his workflow from the earliest stages of conception, to the taking of the photographs, to the final setting and mounting. The film traces the distinctly methodical approach used by Gursky when working with the large man-made spaces, such as commerce and tourism, he is drawn to and reveals his processes in researching his material at length before the final photograph is taken and often altered digitally before printing. Art Lives, from Arthaus, is a series of powerful and arresting documentaries about artists and art movements released for the first time on DVD in the English language.