Following the 2010 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, this magnificent set of slipcased books captures the grandness and lushness of the epic photographs of Andreas Gursky, one of the worlda??s greatest living photographers. In these new works, Gursky demonstrates that a photographer can make or construct--rather than simply take--photographs about modern life and produce them on the scale of epic painting. Just as history painters of previous centuries found their subjects in the realities of everyday life, he seeks inspiration in his observations of the human species in the world, whether firsthand or via reports of global phenomena in the daily media. The resulting pictures have a formal congruence deriving from a bold and edgy dialogue between photography and painting, empirical observation and artfulness, conceptual rigor and spontaneity, representation and abstraction. In pursuit of his aim to create "an encyclopedia of life" Gursky's world view fuses the flux of...