Paris Montparnasse 1993

Andreas Gursky made this photograph, "Paris Montparnasse," and it's like a massive grid of windows, each one a little world. The colour palette is subtle, mostly greys and muted tones, but it’s how Gursky makes a process out of photographing that's interesting. The facade is so huge, the image reads almost like an abstract pattern, but then you see the human element in all those tiny rectangles. I notice that the texture is so smooth, almost clinical, yet the eye jumps around searching for details. Each window is a slightly different shade, a different shape, giving the picture a life of its own, like a giant painting composed of a thousand tiny brushstrokes. It makes me think of Bernd and Hilla Becher, with their deadpan photos of industrial architecture. The difference is Gursky's images are less about documentation and more about a critical vision of contemporary life, offering complexity over fixed ideas.