Michael Wolf
Photographer who found beauty and humanity amid the relentless uniformity of modern megacities
MICHAEL WOLF, the German-born photographer, who has died aged 64, made art out of the dystopian density of Asia’s megacities, finding abstract beauty in the soaring high-rises of Hong Kong and evoking the almost Christ-like suffering of Tokyo commuters pressed against the glass of packed train carriages.
Wolf moved to Hong Kong in 1994 as a photojournalist for the German magazine Stern, though his most famous studies of the city began around the time of the Sars outbreak of 2002. As many people became sick and others left the city he gradually left photojournalism for fine art photography.
In what became known as his “Architecture of Density” series (2003–14), Wolf focused on the city’s vertiginous apartment blocks, removing sky, horizon and ground to give the eye no chance to establish a sense of context or scale. The result, suffocating to look at, consisted of vertical strings of windows rippling across concrete tower after concrete tower – airless, often multicoloured, beehives – producing an effect resembling abstract painting.
On closer inspection, though, his anonymous metropolis was full of irregular human detail
– bits of laundry, curtains and hanging plants peppering the tiny rectangles of windows – reminding the viewer of the human lives lived amid Hong Kong’s relentless high-rise uniformity.
“In Asia, everything is in constant flux, everywhere there’s something being built or a neighbourhood being torn down and it’s very unpredictable,” Wolf explained. “There’s an aspect in my work that’s not only ‘Wow,’ but it’s also ‘What are you doing to your cities, and what’s the quality of life here, and then do we really want this?’”
Michael Wolf was born on July 30 1954 in Munich and brought up in the US and Canada. His mother was a painter and potter; his father was a calligrapher. He was given his first camera by his parents as a 14th birthday present and, after studying at the University of California, Berkeley, took a degree in visual communication at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, West Germany, under the photojournalist Otto Steinert.
After a short period as a freelance documentary photographer in Essen he became a photojournalist, working mainly for Stern magazine and moving to Hong Kong in 1994.
After going freelance, as well as capturing the city’s skyscrapers, Wolf used his telephoto lens to delve into the small change of urban life, documenting cramped public-housing units for a series called “100 x 100” (2006) and touring the vast network of narrow back alleys, or “scavenger lanes”, running between Hong Kong’s buildings for quirky details of everyday life for his project “Informal Solutions” (2003–2019).
“Real Toy Story” (2004), a photographic installation inspired by visits to factories in southern China, consisted of second-hand “made in China” toys attached with magnets to the walls of a gallery, along with photographs of workers making the toys. It won him a World Press Photo award.
“Tokyo Compression” (2010), a collection of portraits of people crushed inside the Japanese capital’s trains, won him another World Press Award. “Just imagine,” he said “… living space is so expensive that you have to commute every day for an hour and a half on a train going to work as a sardine. It’s not a life.” Taking the photographs, he said was “like looking into a ride in hell”.
Some of his projects sparked debate about the right to privacy, though that did not bother the critics. His “Transparent City” project (2008), including zoomed-in images of people inside apartments and office buildings in Chicago, was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet.
In Paris, his “A Series of Unfortunate Events’’ – in which he used the Google Maps “Street View” feature to gather unsettling images of such occurrences as a masked burglar peering over a fence, a van catching fire, a dog defecating, bodies lying in the street – earned an honourable mention in the 2011 World Press Photo competition.
It was reported that legal concerns had been raised about Wolf ’s “Window Watching” (2013) in which he captured images of Hong Kong residents through their high-rise apartment windows – a woman helping a child with homework, a girl lying on a bed talking on the phone, a man doing press-ups in his living room – but he seems to have avoided serious trouble.
Wolf ’s work features in many permanent collections, and he had recently launched “Cheung Chau Sunrises”, a collection of photos taken from the Hong Kong Island where he lived.
Michael Wolf is survived by his wife Barbara and by a son.
Michael Wolf, born July 30 1954, died April 24 2019