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Andreas Gursky began his career primarily shooting monochrome scenes with a handheld camera, however during the nineties he shifted his approach. He began creating the grand wide views for which he is now renowned. He moved away from traditional film and embraced digitally stitched images depicting in detailed detail and colour stock exchanges, industrial plants, e-commerce fulfillment centers, 99 cent stores, winter athletes, and the audience at a Madonna concert.

“My photographs,” he remembers, “were selling for increasingly higher prices.” Indeed, his rising reputation in the art world was evident in his photographs displayed inside luxury boutiques. Subsequently, in 2011, Gursky’s 1999 color image called Rhein II, a horizontal vista of the river winding across level plains near Dusseldorf, astonished auctioneers when it sold for $4.3 million (£2.7m), nearly twice its estimate, establishing it as the highest-priced photo in history. “How does one handle a thing like that?” he remarks. Rhein II retained the title until 2022, when it was overtaken by the artist Man Ray’s iconic surrealist work named Le Violin d’Ingres, which sold for over twelve million dollars.

Angela Merkel was unwilling to be shot from behind. I suppose it was not a very charming proposal

Gursky’s massive works are incredibly intricate, often requiring many years to finish. On average, he completes three annually. He creates them by taking a series of pictures, at times at various places, then merging the sections he believes fit together into one single, impossible image. Given their ambition, complexity, and size, Gursky’s works have been compared to paintings. The scale is essential: “They’re created as big as possible,” he states. “It is not possible to make them larger technically.” Viewers may not realize how much work is involved in making them – is that a concern for him? He is unconcerned.

We are speaking via Zoom however a week later we see each other at a London gallery, where he is installing his latest show. There is an entourage of specialists and helpers working busily. Although the display includes just 16 pieces, Gursky says: “I don’t think I’ve ever presented such different kinds of work.”

This was all planned this way, though. The exhibition features Gas Cooker, one of his earliest works. Dating from the year 1980, the shot gives a somewhat raised perspective of the stovetop at his shared student apartment, its three rings strangely illuminated. Another image depicts protesters in Germany in treetops protesting against the destruction of a rural community, their placard in German saying: “The scenery here is terrible.”

There is a new, melancholic photograph of a glowing steel ingot, a final tribute to the Rhine region’s precarious metal production. And then, there’s one of Gursky’s first iPhone pictures, a playful two-part image of his wife at home adding a piece to a stack of Jenga, with a box on her head. In short, this exhibition reveals different facets to the artist from Germany, more gentle, personal and spontaneous – a notable difference to the detached viewer, the mass-scale artist.

I was facing significant stress to produce for the show – then an photograph appeared unexpectedly

Recently, he called gallerist his gallery representative and requested to delay the exhibition. “His response was, ‘No way, no deal – I have reserved for you the most favorable slot in the entire year. You must manage and get it done.’” So he made ten new works for the show. “That is quite a number for the way I work.”

For someone who has spent the majority of his career carefully building photographs that couldn’t be real, Gursky, currently seventy years old, appears to take delight in the ease of the smartphone. The exhibition contains a number of more intimate, personal photos, from a recent addition to the family to a neatly arranged towel that dropped into a bath. Shot from overhead, the linen seems floating in mid-air, with bubbles of water around its neatly creased form. Get up close and you can see the pixels fuzzing at the borders.

This may seem like the sort of approach only a extremely renowned creator could successfully present. But it underlines what Gursky has always been interested in: the way we perceive the world in photographic fragments. “That towel fell into the bath by mistake,” he explains. “Underwater, it resembled magical realism. I just loved the way it looked. I was under huge pressure to produce for the exhibition, when an image presented itself unexpectedly. I took the shot and there it was.”

The towel is displayed next to a different recent work: a remake of a quintessential photograph created in 1993. He says the updated photograph is better. It depicts an residential block with over a thousand windows in Paris. The new version is composed of multiple photos taken in the colder season, so that the sun wasn’t too bright and the curtains were mostly drawn back, allowing dozens of small glimpses into people’s lives. When viewed up close, increasing elements emerge – one might devote considerable time examining it. However step away and it’s a beautifully detailed non-representational artwork, a composition of squares, from dark to pastel-coloured.

“The work explores the inner life of the structure,” he says. “It is a panopticon of habits, preferences, and the way people like to decorate their flats.” Additionally, it is a contradiction of an image – the work gives a view of almost the whole building, which would be impossible to observe in real life. It is the result of a series of photographs of sections of the structure, photographed from the building across the street then spliced together.

Placed together, the two works demonstrate how diverse Gursky’s interests and inspirations are. Another new work is sure to generate a bit of excitement: a photograph of a famous British musician. He won’t reveal the identity, though they became acquainted through his gallerist. The musician was a admirer of Gursky while the photographer, in return, had “never heard of him”. Nevertheless, they developed a friendship and Gursky joined the star on a concert tour. The picture is shot from the rear of the artist as he plays in a shimmering designer outfit. Beyond is the audience, a mass of shimmering, shouting, yelling faces and iPhones. Gursky previously asked Angela Merkel if he could shoot an picture from a comparable angle but she declined. “I suppose,” he remarks, “it was not a very charming offer – to capture her from behind