Emerging from the renowned Düsseldorf School in the late 1980s, Andreas Gursky was pivotal in creating a new standard in contemporary photography, a pioneer who furthered the possibilities of scale and ambition. His massive, clinical, and distanced surveys of public spaces, landscapes, and structures contributed to a new art of picture taking in contrast to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 1970s. His use of large-format cameras, scanning, digital manipulation, the layering of multiple pictures to create a cohesive image, and technical postproduction positioned him as an important bridge between the old ways of shooting and presenting pictures and the current highly, technologically advanced era of photography.