Michael Wolf (30 July 1954 – 24 April 2019) was a German born artist and photographer who captured daily life in big cities. His work takes place primarily in Hong Kong and Paris and focuses on architectural patterns and structures, as well as the documentation of human life and interaction in the city. Wolf has published multiple photo books, has had his work exhibited widely around the world, has permanent collections across Germany and the United States, and has won three World Press Photo Awards from 2005 to 2011.
Early life Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany, and was raised in the United States, Europe, and Canada.World Press Photo. Michael Wolf. Retrieved August 15, 2011. He grew up in a family of artists; his father was a calligraphist and his mother worked with pottery and paint. He attended the North Toronto Collegiate Institute and the University of California, Berkeley.m97 Gallery. Michael Wolf. Artist Info. Retrieved August 15, 2011. In 1976, he obtained a degree in visual communication at the University of Essen, Germany, where he studied with Otto Steinert.
Professional career Wolf began his career in 1994 as a photojournalist, spending eight years working in Hong Kong for the German magazine Stern. As the magazine industry began to decline over the coming years, his photojournalism assignments became more dense, and he is quoted as saying that they were "stupid and boring."Interview with Michael Wolf. Seconds2Real, February 7, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011. This led his career in a new direction as he strayed from photojournalism and instead began a career in fine-art photography in 2003, which is the work he is most credited for today.
Notable works
Bastard Chairs / Sitting in China Wolf began non-editorial photography with a series entitled Bastard Chairs, small chairs that Chinese people would repair repeatedly using whatever materials were available.An Interview with Michael Wolf. Holy Ghost Zine, August 8, 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011.Lau, Joyce Hor-Chung. Portrait of a Nation. South China Morning Post, November 9, 2003. Wolf reports that the police detained him twice during the photographing of the series for "doing something which was harmful to the Chinese state."Jörg Colberg. A Conversation with Michael Wolf. Conscientious Extended, August 31, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Photographs from the series were published in a 2002 book entitled Sitting in China. Although Wolf called the bastard chairs a "great symbol of the Chinese people's thriftiness and resourcefulness," and the book received positive reviews in the West, some Chinese people felt that the photographs made China appear "backward."Press, Joy. Fan Fare: Collecting This Season's Coffee-Table Books. Village Voice, December 3, 2002. Retrieved August 15, 2011.Baker, Kenneth. The Art of Finding the Right Book: Paintings and Photographs Highlight Five Distinctive Volumes. San Francisco Chronicle, December 15, 2002. Retrieved August 15, 2011.
The Real Toy Story In follow-up to the China: Factory of the World series, Wolf created an installation entitled The Real Toy Story.Rüggeberg, Stefanie. Made in China. Museum der Arbeit: Installation mit 20 000 Spielzeugen. Der Fotograf Michael Wolf hat sich in Chinas Spielzeugfabriken umgesehen. Hamburger Abendblatt, September 5, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2011. It consisted of 20,000 toys made in China and purchased in California attached with magnets to the walls of the gallery, along with photographs of workers making the toys.
Architecture of Density In this series, Wolf photographed Hong Kong's tall buildings in a way that depicted them as "abstractions, never-ending repetitions of architectural patterns."Feustel, Marc. Towards a New Street Photography. Foam Magazine #22, Spring 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011. The photographs excluded the sky and the ground, thereby emphasizing the vertical lines of the buildings.Day, Lara. Photographer Michael Wolf's Tall Order. Time Magazine, January 25, 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011. The images have been compared with those of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer.Hall, Emily. Michael Wolf: Bruce Silverstein. Artforum, January 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Tugo Cheng, an architect and fine artist from Hong Kong, described these images saying "He took a building that is very three-dimensional and compressed it into a surface in a way that would make one feel breathless and lost in scale."
The first book containing images from the series, Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door, was published in 2005.Loh, Maria. Made in Hong Kong. The Art Book, Volume 13, Issue 2, pages 3–5, May 2006. One review noted the book's "representation of an overpopulated city emptied of its human presence" and praised "the visual intelligence of Wolf's photographs." The Outside volume of Wolf's two-volume 2009 book Hong Kong Inside Outside contained a more extensive selection of photographs from this series.
100x100 In 2006, Wolf took photographs of residents in their rooms in a building in Hong Kong's oldest public housing complex, the Shek Kip Mei Estate, which was going to be demolished.Lau, Kit-wai. End of an Era. South China Morning Post, November 1, 2006. He used a wide-angle lens to show as much of the interiors of the rooms as possible.Lapinski, Valerie. Showcase: A Room of Everyone's Own. Lens Blog, New York Times, November 13, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Each room was approximately in size, and he displayed photographs of 100 rooms, leading to the name "100x100." In an interview, Wolf likened the series to a scientific project, "an investigation into the use of limited space." The Inside volume of Wolf's two-volume book Hong Kong Inside Outside of 2009 contained the complete photographs from this series.
Copy Art / Real Fake Art Between 2005 and 2007, Wolf photographed painters in Shenzhen, China, who reproduced famous works of art such as Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh.Chan, Michelle. The Art of Copying. The Standard, May 5, 2007. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Each portrait consisted of a "copy artist" along with an example of a copied work. The settings were described as "dirty alleyways and street corners."Lavapie, James. Michael Wolf: Capturing Counterfeit. Corduroy Magazine blog, July 18, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011. One reviewer wrote that the pictures "document intimate cultural and economic facets of globalization even as they record and complicate critical dilemmas about authenticity and the non-economic values of art."Baker, Kenneth. Searching for Meaning within a Forest of Asterisks. San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2007. Retrieved August 15, 2011. The series was collected in his book Real Fake Art published in 2011.
Transparent City A series shot in downtown Chicago beginning in 2006 that "combine[d] impersonal cityscapes shot primarily at dusk or at night with details of the buildings’ inhabitants" became the basis for the 2008 book Transparent City.Estrin, James. Showcase: Life Behind Glass. Lens Blog, New York Times, July 2, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2011. The photographs were taken from rooftops at dusk with a long lens.Hockenberry, John. Leaves of Glass. Metropolis, vol. 28, no. 4, pages 80-87, November 2008. Retrieved August 15, 2011. As in the Architecture of Density series, the exterior photographs excluded the horizon and the sky, leaving the windows of the buildings as the main subjects. In one interview, Wolf said that he came upon the idea of showing close-ups of people in the windows after he noticed a man giving him the finger in a photograph.Michael Wolf ("As told to Brian Sholis"). ArtForum, November 14, 2008. Retrieved August 15, 2011. In another interview, Wolf cited the artistic work of Edward Hopper as an inspiration for the series because of its voyeuristic nature and its inclusion of architectural details.
In an interview, Wolf said that shooting in Chicago convinced him to switch from film to digital. "For most of my first major series Architecture of Density, I shot with a 4×5 film camera," he said. "But when it came to shooting Chicago—which is a very windy city—the slightest gust of wind would vibrate the tripod, and I suspected many of my photographs would be ruined." Shooting digital allowed him to review the days' images, and guaranteed the precision Wolf wanted. "There’s nothing accidental in my photos," he added in the same interview.
Articles about the book connected the photographs to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock.Szupinska, Joanna. Michael Wolf: Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, California. ArtUS, no. 27, page 20, September 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2011.Casper, Jim. Photo Book Review. The Transparent City. LensCulture, volume 19, January–March 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2011. One reviewer described the book as "frightening," causing a feeling of "remoteness." The series was controversial because some people felt that the cropped and enlarged photographs of people in the buildings constituted an invasion of privacy.
Tokyo Compression In the 2010 book Tokyo Compression, Wolf presented portraits of Japanese people inside crowded Tokyo subway trains who had been pressed against a window.McCurry, Justin. Going Underground, Tokyo Style. The Guardian, December 1, 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011.Williams, Holly. The End of the Line: Michael Wolf's Photographs of the Tokyo Rush Hour Will Make Every Commuter Shudder. The Independent, January 15, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011. The commuters' expressions were characterized in one review as "traumatised" and "woeful." Wolf stated that some people closed their eyes or hid their faces with their hands upon realizing that they were being photographed.
One reviewer concluded that Wolf's Architecture of Density, Transparent City, and Tokyo Compression series represented a progression from long shot to close-up. Wolf won a first prize in Daily Life in the 2009 World Press Photo competition for his Tokyo Compression work.World Press Photo. 2009, Michael Wolf, 1st prize, Daily Life. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Martin Parr selected the 2010 book as one of the 30 most influential photobooks published between 2001 and 2010.PhotoIreland Festival announces Martin Parr’s selection of the 30 most influential photobooks of the last decade. July 1–31, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011.
Tokyo Compression was part of Metropolis, City Life in the Urban Age, the 2011 Noorderlicht Photofestival. One of Wolf's pictures was used for the poster, the cover of the catalogue and all media material of the exhibition.
Series using Google Street View In several series, such as Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Wolf took photographs of Google Street View scenes on his computer screen.Pasulka, Nicole. Iseeyou. The Morning News, November 1, 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011.Casper, Jim. A Series of Unfortunate Events. LensCulture, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2011. Wolf compared his method of finding interesting scenes online to those of a street photographer walking around in a city. He has called his Street View series "a statement about art."Photo: The Invisible Paris (interview with Michael Wolf). The Outlook Magazine, issue 100, August 2010. Retrieved August 15, 2011.
The Street View photographs were characterized by pixelation and image noise which were compared with techniques used by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in their art. The work led to discussion of how the automatically taken Google Street View images affected the "decisive moment" concept of Henri Cartier-Bresson; nevertheless, the photographs were said to contain "some mystery" in that they were "hard to interpret." Some of Wolf's photographs resemble recognized classics of photography such as Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (The Kiss) by Robert Doisneau.
Controversy