Shanghai,

2000

Early in his career, Gursky was enthralled by the sublime and became known for his large-format minimalist landscapes. Around 1990, he shifted his attention to global capitalism, photographing contemporary society’s obsession with industry, technology, advertising, and luxury. In Shanghai, a highly detailed view of the Shanghai Grand Hyatt hotel lobby, Gursky draws our attention to the grandeur of the interior space by enveloping us in a disorienting field of rich color and light. Gursky created Shanghai by photographing the atrium from three different floors and then digitally manipulating the images, bringing the background to the same resolution as the foreground and fusing them together. As a result, the height of the actual lobby is exaggerated; we are unable to locate ourselves in the space and our senses are overwhelmed. With no physical references to the city of Shanghai or the country of China, this architectural structure could be located anywhere in the in today’s globalized world.