Remember to take a packet of paracetamol when you next go to White Cube Mason’s Yard. You may need them after looking at the latest addition to Andreas Gursky’s oeuvre.

Gursky is the most deliberate of photographers. He never takes pictures. He makes them over the course of months, sometimes years, planning and refining vast, colour-saturated works that portray the multiplicity of our world and the recurrent structures that regulate it.

His photographs are highly sought after and hang in museums and galleries all over the world – one sold last year at auction for $2.4 million (£1.2 million) – giving us views of, for example, the teeming chaos of the Chicago Stock Exchange, the beautifully lit shelves of a Stockholm library or a minimalist stretch of the Rhein. Now that photography has come close to achieving parity with paintings in museums, Gursky, who is a ruling master of the Dösseldorf School, the crucible of contemporary art photography in Europe, has become one of the leading artists of our time. Six years ago, MoMA in New York devoted a major exhibition to his work, and his star has been steadily rising since.

Recently Gursky has been visiting North Korea. This is where the headaches start. In 2005 he talked his way into the Arirang Festival in Pyongyang, an annual gymnastic display in honour of the late Kim Il Sung, in which 50,000 meticulously choreographed performers entertain 30,000 schoolchildren, who are also themselves performing with flip cards to create vast, minutely detailed pictures in the stands. To my eyes it is a nightmarish event.

Gursky uses a 5x7in large format camera. It took him 18 months to get permission to shoot at all, and then more to negotiate to get his cumbersome camera into the right position in the stadium. “We were always working on the very edge of failure,” he told one reporter. “Eventually, they put us up high in the middle of the stadium, next to a portrait of Kim Il Sung; it was the perfect elevation for what I wanted to achieve. The extra distance allowed the camera to manage the movement of the performers.”

The results are, frankly, terrifying. Here are several thousand tiny gymnasts in blue leotards balancing on their heads in perfectly ordered lines, interspersed with several thousand more gymnasts lined up in red and yellow, their spines curled backwards into tiny “O”s. Behind them sit more seemingly identical thousands waiting for flip-card instructions.

There are too many North Koreans to count, far more than the human eye can take in unaided, but the camera sees them all, as well as all their tiny straining muscles.

There are other pictures from the festival too – thousands of soldiers frozen in diamond formations, girls in complex flower formations, and so on. The repetitive sequences seem to go on to infinity and make one think of colonies of very colourful, well-drilled ants. It is all slightly hallucinogenic, a bit like a Bridget Riley painting, but made out of humans, and the results are utterly alienating.

You want to believe it isn’t true. But although Gursky is frank about the digital manipulation of his images (he has been known to work on some photographs one pixel at a time), these ones didn’t need much manipulation. “ Pyongyang III is, in reality, two photographs brought together. You would only see the card holders when they were waiting for whatever was about to take place on the pitch. Otherwise, I only made some formal corrections in terms of composition in the other images, and the events as they took place are very similar to what you see in the photographs.”

Gursky’s subject is emblematic of a mentality. This level of human capacity for control is surely as close to regulated sentient human life as is possible today on this planet. This is a modern state of mind made visible in an image.

His role in making photographs, he has said, is as an extraterrestrial being, knowing nothing of the world, who looks at contemporary society and tries to figure out what is going on there. With the fastidiousness of an anthropologist, he groups his subjects under specific cultural headings. Capitalism, consumerism and leisure feature heavily. The behaviour of humans in defensive communist communities is a new passion.

Another new series of photographs, F1 Boxenstopp (2007), depicts the frenetic activity that takes place in pit-stops during Formula One races. Dozens of technicians and mechanics in colour-coded overalls and helmets swarm around the vehicles, hurriedly refuelling and repairing, while spectators look down from behind glass in the hospitality suites above the track. The most powerful cars in the world, it seems to suggest, with their massive sponsorship and advanced technology, depend fundamentally on fallible human beings – human beings who nevertheless dress like robots.

Much is being made at White Cube of the James Bond Island series, three aerial shots of the rocky island peaks around Khao Phing Kan in Thailand, which was used as a location for the 1974 film The Man with the Golden Gun. Gursky tames the islands with his camera, boxing them into his frame as they float on a turquoise sea. But his instinct is less sure here. The results look like a send-up of a postcard of an improbably beautiful location, and one is left unmoved by the question of whether they really exist or not.

Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 and brought up in Dös-seldorf, where he attended the photography course at the Kunstakademie. This was run at the time by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the leading apostles of a rigorous, minimalist approach to photography that was intended to take the medium back to its 19th-century roots as impersonal, quasi-scientific documentation. To get there, Gursky had crossed over from the enemy camp. His grandfather, Hans Gursky, had been a successful portrait photographer, and his parents, Willy and Rose-marie, had run one of Dössel-dorf’s most successful commercial photo studios.

You can see the influence of his family background in the technical ingenuity of his work and sometimes in the high finish, reminiscent of commercial advertising. But the force that drives Gursky, which perhaps comes in part from the Bechers, is an interest in species – human or otherwise. He is not especially interested in individuals. What he finds fascinating is the buildings we build, the lonely natural habitats we escape to and the modern-day temples in which we convene – the banks, shops, museums and rock concerts – in order to practise our secular acts of worship.

His big, bold, highly structured photographs are among the hottest commodities in the contemporary art world, often teeming with material life like a 17th-century Dutch still-life painting but with the addition of a touch of machine-made irony. “I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment,” he says. And in North Korea he has found his heaven.

Andreas Gursky is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London SW1 (020-7930 5373; www.whitecube.com), from Friday to May 5. Andreas Gursky’s photographs will also be on show at Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, 7A Grafton Street, London W1 (07804 274239; www.spruethmagerslondon.com), from Friday to May 12

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