About the well-known piece "Rhine 2."

Gursky's 1999 photograph Rhine 2 shows a path with no contours, a meadow, a river, and a grey sky that almost perfectly form a horizontal framework. Gursky also destroyed a factory on the other side of the river digitally.

The 1,320-kilometer-long Rhine River flows from Switzerland's Alps to the Netherlands, where it eventually empties into the North Sea. Its basin measures 185,000 square kilometres. The Rhine Valley experienced the second industrial revolution in the middle of the 19th century, which was driven by Germany. The cities flourished quickly, and the textile industry increased quickly as well. This "father river" was being pushed beyond the point of no return by people driven by desire. The Rhine was still becoming more and more polluted as the 20th century came to a close. There were several industrial areas along the Rhine, especially the Ruhr industrial area in Germany, and several energy, chemical, and smelting businesses used the river for industrial water while also dumping a lot of wastewater into it. The water quality of the Rhine has dramatically declined as a result of the presence of more than 60,000 dangerous pollutants, including heavy metal compounds, pesticides, hydrocarbons, and organic chlorides. Ecosystem damage along the Rhine was at an all-time high, and the number of biological species was rapidly disappearing. The Rhine was designated as the "sewer of Europe" and was deemed "dead" by biology. The biggest river management action plan in European environmental history was started as a result of this. Today's Rhine, which began in the Swiss Alps, flows through Basel's chemical towers, through the steel furnaces of Germany's Ruhr industrial region, and ultimately winds its way into the sea between Rotterdam, the Netherlands' enormous oil tank formations. It is astounding that, after nine nations, the river is still as pure as ever. The Rhine is now one of the world's most successful rivers in terms of the interaction between people and rivers after more than 40 years of rehabilitation.

Gursky wished to return the Rhine to its pre-pollution state, when there was no sign of habitation along its banks.