Gursky

Gursky December 2005 | Filed under Photos, Still Life | Comments (2)

Perhaps my favourite present this Christmas was from Sophie, who gave me a wonderful book of Andreas Gursky photographs. I'm a massive fan of Gurksy's work - the infinite depth-of-field, and the wonderful patterns he sees or creates - and the book (whose cover is abominably reproduced on Amazon) is simply wonderful. I could lose myself in it for hours.

Underneath the Gursky book you can see the other book Sophie gave me, Bill Henson's Mnemosyne, which on any other Christmas day would have been top of the pile - Henson was the first photographer whose work really spoke to me, and this huge, heavy hardback is a definitive retrospective.

Views from the Floor

Khoi Vinh says:

I have the hardbound catalog from Gursky’s MoMA show several years ago. It’s gorgeous, and I’m a fan of his work, but nothing quite matches the experience of physically standing in front of one of his gargantuan photographic prints. I’m waiting for them to produce a book that’s, say, 1.5 meters tall by 2 meters wide to really do justice to the man’s work. Don’t think it’ll never happen; they can do anything with computers nowadays.

Virginia says:

Almost the highlight of my trip to New York in '04 was an exhibition of Gurky's stuff in Chelsea. I think there were nine or ten works, and I could've stay in front of each one for an hour.

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This sentence is not modelled on a luxury yacht

11 January 2008
Filed under Language, Text, The Media

People paid up to $US100,000 ($A115,000) for the inaugural Singapore Airlines A380 flight last year, in which first class suites with real beds were modelled on luxury yachts, after wiring glitches caused the plane’s delivery to be delayed by two years, causing EADS billions of dollars in losses.

This sentence was already too long when they decided to add the bit about the beds. Why on earth is it relevant, when reporting on an airport mishap, to note that the beds on the plane involved were modelled on luxury yachts?*

It’s a really common construction in stories coming straight off the wires and into the paper: you have the story, which is usually two or three short paragraphs, followed by a gargantuan sentence into which somebody has packed the entire history of the subject, with no regard to whether the clauses in the sentence relate to each other or to the story at large.

* Update: I can’t read.

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