Saltz on Gursky: the fizz has gone flat

Jerry Saltz's review of the new Andreas Gursky show at Matthew Marks is in this week's New York Magazine.

Gursky is still trying to render purring pre-9/11 space, where commerce ticked along without an undercurrent of fear. But his rigor and criticality have been replaced by grandiosity and theatricality; figures feel frozen; compositions are stagy; structure devolves into carpetlike pattern. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform.

I have not yet seen the show. I probably won't. Saltz's review was almost, in my opinion, inevitable. It's hard to keep topping yourself, particularly when you basically defined the current epoch of photography. Reinvention is no picnic. Nor particularly lucrative.

But the increasing prevalence of digital manipulation in photography, beyond digital darkroom techniques (a blurry line, of course), brings photography closer and closer to painting and, consequentially, loses the distinctive qualities that separate photography from other media.