The Hollywood blockbuster Kong: Skull Island (2017) portrays a group of explorers on a swampy island inhabited by giant, hostile creatures. A photojournalist, played by Brie Larson, often pauses to take a snapshot of the action. As she holds up her camera, we see the scene through her lens, tightly framed. And as the shutter clicks, the film freezes into a still picture. The message is clear: Photographs stop time, transforming the flux of experience into a fixed image.

In 2003 the art historian Michael Diers wrote an essay comparing Gursky’s iconic Paris, Montparnasse (1993) to both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio (1494) by Giovanni Mansueti. All three artworks depict a world of windows and multiplicity.

Architecture is, of course, one of Gursky’s favorite subjects. Taipei (1999) has an atmosphere of condensed space, with just a few figures visible, while May Day V (2006) features hundreds of revelers (including the artist himself) dispersed across the gridded façade of the high-rise building. For Diers, the overabundance of windows and frames in Paris, Montparnasse and Rear Window offers an example of what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bahktin called “chronotopos,” or “spacetime.” Diers then introduces art historian Wolfgang Kemp’s notion of “narrative architectures,” an adaptation of Bahktin’s theory, which describes the presence of parallel narratives and simultaneous scenes in a single picture.

Gursky’s monumental new photograph Kreuzfahrt (Cruise) (2020) is a vision of the twenty-first century sublime. The cruise ship, still in the process of being constructed, is unimaginably huge, a world unto itself. Yet there are worlds within worlds, a vast “narrative architecture,” and there are even figures visible in the windows, as is the case with Paris, Montparnasse or May Day V. Likewise, each window creates a frame, a lens through which passengers can view and comprehend the outside world. If, as Goethe famously observed, architecture is frozen music, Kreuzfahrt (Cruise) allows us to experience architectural space as a spatial form that moves through time, like a piece of music. Linger in the details and there are pictures within pictures, notes within bars, chords, melodies and intimate moments. Repetitive, polyphonic and rhythmic, the pictorial space unfolds in time like a minimalist symphony.

As Gursky’s anecdote about how he made Utah suggests, the smartphone has become a kind of sketchbook for the artist. Utah has all the blurriness of a casual snapshot, yet at a scale to match his panoramic vision, the picture offers a rich tapestry of the American west. What we might normally consider a weakness of amateur photography—a shutter speed too slow to capture the image clearly—is here transformed into a new conception of visual experience. Ralf Rugoff, in his essay for Gursky’s Hayward retrospective, argues that “Utah is not just a somewhat painterly epic landscape … but a trenchant reflection on the medium's changing relationships with the world of forms and the forms of the world.”

Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020) may not immediately bring to mind a work by Andreas Gursky. Instead of an expansive view of a landscape or a building, we see two pictures of a woman playing a game in a domestic space. Moreover, the photographs resemble the kind of private snapshots uploaded onto social media platforms. Look closely, however, and you might discern a few of Gursky’s key themes: Architecture, duration, entropy, frames, the tension between pictorial space and the potential for narrative. But here the artist introduces a sense of playfulness, even absurdity. A woman, with a box over her head, stands on a sofa, reaching to the peak of a toy construction that resembles the Tokyo or Eiffel towers. In the second picture (if we read left to right), she leans forward, attempting to place a block of wood atop the structure. Is this a metaphor for the precarious state of the planet? What happened before the first picture, and what will happen next?
 
We will never know. There is no before or after. Part of the pleasure of pictorial art is the information it withholds. For all its apparent simplicity, Königsbergerstrasse, diptych (2020), opens up an infinite “spacetime” for the viewer’s imagination. Only the viewer can complete the tower, or bring it crashing down to earth.