Dusseldorf School of Photography

A group of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Ruff, who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) in the 1970s and rose to prominence in the 1980s. Responding in part to the concerns of the New Topographics, these artists’ works are characterized by a sober, documentary quality, “straight on” (and often expansive) "topographic" views of landscapes, a focus on cityscapes or interior environments, and the minimization of the human figure. Since the 1990s, aided by new technical capabilities in digital photography and printing, a hallmark of the group’s photographs has been a combination of dizzying detail and monumental size, giving the works an immersive quality and contributing to a blurring of the boundaries between photography and painting.