1955 in Leipzig, East Germany. He grew up in Dusseldorf, West Germany. Gursky was the grandson and son of commercial photographers. He studied Photography at the Folkwang Academy in Essen during the late 1970’s. He later became a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher in Dusseldorf at the Staatliche Kunstakademie. He attended this school from 1981-1987, at this time photographing in black and white was common. He started photographing this way, but it did not take long for him to branch out and begin working
The deadpan aesthetic consists of either portraits or landscapes absent of any obvious emotion, presenting the subject and places purely how they are in the everyday world, generating questions and therefore providing a non-bias relationship between the viewers and the image. The use of deadpan photography became prominent in the 1990s particularly with the hallmark appearance of landscape and architectural subject matter, which has, therefore, become a major part of conceptual photography today