Andreas Gursky. The Most Expensive Photographer

Andreas Gursky holds the record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image. His print ’99 Cent II, Diptych’ sold for $3.3 million at Sotheby’s, London.

He was born in Leipzig in 1955, but he grew up in Düsseldorf, the son of a commercial photographer. In the early 1980s, at Germany’s State Art Academy, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery. A similar approach may be found in Gursky’s methodical approach to his own, larger-scale photography.