Rhein II

Rhein II is a large-format color photograph made by the German artist Andreas Gursky in 1999, showing a stretch of the Lower Rhine reduced to flat horizontal bands of river, green fields and grey sky. Gursky digitally removed elements that would have been visible in the actual view, including dog walkers, cyclists and a factory building, arguing that the resulting image, though not obtainable in situ, gave a truer picture of the modern river than an unaltered photograph could. A print sold at Christie's in New York in 2011 for 4,338,500 dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction, a record it held until 2022.