Beautiful post. Thank you. I'm reminded of another poet who spoke of the commonplace and accessible to address the spirit:

When the rambler returns
from the mountain to the vale,
he carries no esoteric clump
of soil, but some hard won word,
pure and simple: a blossom of
gentian, yellow and blue.

Could it not be that we
are here to say: house,
bridge, cistern, gate,
pitcher, flowering tree,
window-or at most:
monolith... skyscraper?

But to say them in a way
they, themselves, never
knew themselves to be?
Is not the undeclared intent
of Earth, in urging lovers on,
to make creation thrill to
the rhythms of their rapture?

From: The Ninth Duino Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Rober Hunter)

I don't really see the "totalitarianism of the world we have built"/"cold calculation of capitalism" thing. They're impressive photographs, yes, but the what does a library have to do with the cold calculation of capitalism? Would it be better for the books to be scattered about in a pleasingly random way? And from the text accompanying the Times Square photo, there's this:

"In fact, the picture is, to a considerable degree, an invention—a seamless image derived from photographs but recomposed and otherwise manipulated in Gursky's computer. It is at once hyper-real and unreal, an indelible image of our artificial world, made with the aid of the tool of our time."

Well, shit, you could take pictures of the souk in Marrakech or the Grand Canyon and turn them into a cold, sterile image of capitalist vacuum with enough computer manipulation. I go to Times Square a lot, and believe me, it doesn't look like that. Who cares, they're amazing images... but I wouldn't build any great socio-philosophical structures on them.

Hey, thanks for the tip, Stewart; I went through Link and it remembers my info!

The "instinctive recoil" isn't felt by the majority in our consumer society, as demonstrated by the success of supermarkets, shopping malls etc. and the gradual demise of the small corner shop.
So when you say "we", I guess you mean those of us chatting here around the dinner table. But are we the 'real' world? i.e. the one that crowds the supermarkets and 99c aisles?
By the way, I wouldn't twin Dali with Norman Rockwell but with Andy Warhol, both masters of self-promotion and self-deception.

Your post has got me thinking. I do think the photos are well done. Don't you think that he put himself in places that naturally speak to the notion 'to simultaneously present monumentality and minutiae.' I think they have more of an impressionistic quality. Or even that of a color field artist. I know I'm not speaking very clear on this. My brain has gone to mush.

I actually tend to agree with Language Hat in certain respects. The ideas that these images portray is powerful, yes, and I was almost nauseated by the sense of excessive space.

But I think that this is somewhat of a misleading commentary. The featureless, horrific spaces portrayed in these works are more of an indictment of bad human architecture, examined from bad vantage points. If the colours were softer, if the shapes were more biomorphic, if the shot was taken at a different angle, a similar shot would be certainly be far more pleasing.

Therefore, one possible solution would be to hire a better interior decorator for these spaces, not necessarily to address the underlying social / economic issues that the artist seems to be focusing on... :)

I like it, I like it.... but what I really want to hear you expound on is the secret relation of Gursky and.... Paul Celan.

Not that there is one. (But isn't there?)

I take it you don't think much of capitalism. What do you recommend to replace it? Fortunately, I do like Walt Whitman, and I can relate to your juxtaposition of the two (more concretely with the 99c store than the other Gursky examples). But I can't help thinking how Whitman would have reacted to the 99c Store. My guess is he would have viewed it positively rather than negatively, and would be fascinated by the way this interminable list of inanimate items can be visually fused into a pleasing image...he might see the items in the store as cogently as his leaves of grass as available for everyone to contemplate or even consume, and that they can serve the same purpose in human spirituality,if approached positively, as his leaves of grass. No doubt he would see the store as proof of the power of capitalism to offer amazing choice and plenty to a unifiable world.

please stop idealizing and intellectualing your theories of literary works and artworks. there's a lot more fun things to do in the world like, walking in a park. do you ever feel that you are treading water in the mutually congradulatory world of criticism? It's a small world and doesn't "serve a purpose" why not go build a bridge?

I was inspired by that picture of the library, having had my mind primed by a cartoon in the current issue of the New Yorker. So I wrote a poem about it on my own blog. Thanks for the link.

Peter H,
Maybe the replacement is still on the horizon and is as yet unnamed.

"I take it you don't think much of the monarchy, well what do you recommend to repace it?"

This might sound weird, but here is what I thought while reading Caterina's post.

Last week in North America there was a total lunar eclipse (May 15th). I stayed outside to watch it, as I do every time (I am an unabashed science geek).

This time, however, I felt uneasy to see the shadow of the earth pass over the moon. It made the solar system feel like a little toy. I mean, the solar system - our world - is perfect. Yet plain as can be, 250,000 miles away, is the earth casting a shadow on the moon.

I still haven't shaken the feeling: at once I was awed by the grandeur of our solar system but sort of - I don't know, unnerved - at thinking the whole thing looked like something not too different from the little tiny model of the solar system on my desk, with shadows cast by a 100 watt bulb.

A great psychologist named Harlow studied emotions in primates, and he found that monkeys would freak out if an artificial "mother" monkey was placed near them - basically a manequin mother monkey covered with linen. Cognitive psychologists think this is what happens when well-worn neural pathways collide with perception. When a firm gestalt is broken. We crave familiarity in the natural world, and we are horribly unnerved by experiences of artificial things masquerading as natural.

what i was thinking while reading caterina's post was "how does she have time for this?" i know she's building a company and must be very busy, but almost every day there's something like this that would take me a week to think about and write about. i love my job but when i come home at night i'm too tired to do anything other than sleep or watch t.v. or think about work even more. sometimes i feel inadequate reading this page. like i'm not making enough time in my life for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or continuing growth into adulthood. i enjoy this site because it teaches me, exposes me to new things and reminds me to try harder.

one thing i do know though is that "congratulatory" has a "t", not a "d".

The library, I am fairly sure, is Asplund's Stockholm Public Library, and is, I think, a much-loved building. Not shown by the photograph is the reading room on the floor of the drum or the windows, as far above the top of the stacks as the stacks are above the floor; the "vacuum" makes space for people at floor level and gentle daylight above. (An old daytime picture can be seen at .)

I'm sorry to respond in this way, but...the story of at least that place isn't the one you took away from the print. I doubt it was the story that Asplund intended.

spelling nitpicking comments aside, (If meaning is clear what is the point? besides a search engine perhaps) and not to turn this comment block into a chat room.. Caterina is the intellectual Martha Stewart of the world. Which is great, but what I question is the entire field of abstract intellectual inquiry in general. What elses comes of obsecure reference linking besides a monetary "oh that's so nice" in the brain? maybe this in and of itself is enough, or does real worth cement itself in the physical world of utility? retorical of course.

that picture reminded me of geof darrow's stuff! (or katshiro otomo's :) oh and godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle! (or reggio's stuff :)

Thank you, Caterina, for a lovely link. I'm a fan of both Gursky and Whitman but had not thought of the two of them together.

The thing about Gursky that has always drawn me is that his photos are indeed hyper-real, but they look completely innocuous. You don't even think you're being manipulated, but you are. Especially in his crowd scenes: all those sweaty bodies. Oh, the human masses! But wait--didn't I see that kid with the green hair over on the other side of the picture?

I wonder whether you were influenced by Allen Ginsberg's poem A Supermarket in California, which begins

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

The part that sticks in my head is where he imagines Whitman "eyeing the grocery boys."

On more reflection, the photographs all have a very similar composition, with a very large collection of similar objects being shown in three-dimensional grids derived from architectural form; it is not, I think, capitalism made visible as much as the geometric order of such spaces, which in turn derives from the structural order of the devices used to order the spaces--verticality broken by horizontal planes with space to allow for circulation and visibility.

(Gaw, tired architecture students run on.)