Rhein (photograph)
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Rhein, also known as Rhein I, is a colour photograph created by the German photographer Andreas Gursky in 1996. The photograph had a six copies edition. This was the first version of a photograph that become better known with his second version, Rhein II, in 1999.[1][2]
The photograph was created using digital manipulation, which removed several human references, including people and buildings. The final result, showing the river flowing across green fields, beneath a blue cloudy sky, has similarities with the abstract paintings of Barnett Newman. Peter Galassi stated that: "Behind Gursky's taste for the imposing clarity of unbroken parallel forms spanning a slender rectangle lies a rich inheritance of reductivist aesthetics, from Friedrich to Newman to Richter to Donald Judd... (with) images that read like horizontal versions of Newman paintings."[3] This version has less vivid colors and a narrower field of vision than Rhein II.