Michael Wolf

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 was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany, and was raised in the United States, Europe, and Canada.

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.

In 1976, he obtained a degree in visual communication at the University of Essen, Germany, where he studied with Otto Steinert.

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."

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."

In follow-up to the China: Factory of the World series, Wolf created an installation entitled The Real Toy Story.

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.

In this series, Wolf photographed Hong Kong's tall buildings in a way that depicted them as "abstractions, never-ending repetitions of architectural patterns."

The photographs excluded the sky and the ground, thereby emphasizing the vertical lines of the buildings.

The images have been compared with those of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer.

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."

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.

Wolf began non-editorial photography with a series entitled Bastard Chairs, small chairs that Chinese people would repair repeatedly using whatever materials were available.

Wolf reports that the police detained him twice during the photographing of the series for "doing something which was harmful to the Chinese state."

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.

The first book containing images from the series, Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door, was published in 2005.

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."

Between 2005 and 2007, Wolf photographed painters in Shenzhen, China, who reproduced famous works of art such as Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh.

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."

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."

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.

He used a wide-angle lens to show as much of the interiors of the rooms as possible.

Each room was approximately 100 sqft 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."

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.

The photographs were taken from rooftops at dusk with a long lens.

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.

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.

The Outside volume of Wolf's two-volume 2009 book Hong Kong Inside Outside contained a more extensive selection of photographs from this series.

The Inside volume of Wolf's two-volume book Hong Kong Inside Outside of 2009 contained the complete photographs from this series.

The series was collected in his book Real Fake Art published in 2011.