Chicago Board of Trade II 1999

Curator: First impressions? A buzzing hive… but not one producing honey. Chaos! Editor: I'm so glad you said that. Because what we're looking at is "Chicago Board of Trade II," a photograph taken in 1999 by Andreas Gursky. It's a scene so dense, you almost lose the individual. Curator: Yes, anonymous in the intensity. I immediately think of ritual…like, perhaps the ecstatic dances of dervishes, but for profit. What are those tiny white rectangles fluttering around? Editor: Those would be the trading tickets, I think! Lost futures, or futures gained… depending on how you read it. I am quite captivated by how Gursky is able to monumentalize something so temporal and fleeting, using realism to depict what feels quite abstract. You'll notice this scene contains hundreds of people, yet the photograph's composition flattens everything. It's a sea of individuals all merging into this singular…mass. Curator: Absolutely! I love that contrast - the intimate gestures within a composition of vast scale. There's a real tension between order and disorder, figures shouting and trading. Is that visual noise a reflection of the actual noise? The relentless hunger? I mean, for me, it reads as almost an apocalyptic vision… or perhaps the creation of a new world order. Editor: It certainly captures a spirit of transition. You know, these photographs were taken near the turn of the millennium, a time when traditional trading floors were beginning to give way to electronic systems. So the teeming floor starts to resemble something archaic, even as it captures something eternal about human ambition, competition, even greed. Curator: Yes, like cogs in some… financial clock. A complex dance between humanity and…what is essentially abstraction. That it still exists as an active theme is really kind of intense. It speaks, loudly. Editor: For me, seeing the architecture surrounding the people highlights the grandeur and ambition inherent in that type of capitalism. Its depiction almost resembles that of religious or spiritual spaces. Very telling of how people worship economics, how intertwined belief and financial power can become. A dense composition, indeed, teeming with things to see!