Making of ‘Rhein II’ (by Andreas Gursky, 1999), 2012

The story behind the photograph…

’Rhein II’ was created in 1999 by the German photographic artist Andreas Gursky (b. 1955). Gursky is renowned for his large-scale, highly detailed works depicting the landscape, architecture and industry of the modern world. A member of the Düsseldorf school of photography (he was taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher, along with his contemporaries Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth), he makes work that is typically immersive, expansive and richly complex. However, ‘Rhein II’ is at first glance a relatively simple, abstract piece. It depicts a stretch of the Rhine just outside Düsseldorf, and was created using Gursky’s usual process – photographing with a large-format camera before scanning the film so that the image can be digitally manipulated. With ‘Rhein II’, a factory on the far side of the river and people walking on the banks were removed, leaving the water as a single horizontal band between two green fields under an overcast sky. It was produced in an edition of six prints, and the first (and largest) print in the series came to wide public attention when, in November 2011, it was auctioned at Christie’s in New York for $4.3 million, which made it the world’s most expensive photograph.