Author Description

Ever since her first photographic projects in the early 70s, Candida Höfer’s primary interest has been public space: interiors such as libraries, lecture halls, lobbies, museums, club houses, and the urban landscape, with its public squares, streets, or zoos. Over the years people gradually disappeared from her pictures and yet the presence of humans became ever more manifest in her empty rooms—attested to by the absence of those for whom they were built or furnished. Foregoing any spectacular staging of the locations, Höfer imbues the emptiness with substance by a subtle attention to color. The silence thus instilled with a metaphysical quality lends a voice to the objects—above and beyond the eloquence of the furnishings or the pathos of the architecture. With 209 photographs, the present volume is the first major monograph on the œuvre of Candida Höfer, one of the greats of the current international photographic and art community.