Michael WOLF (1954 – 2019, Germany)
Tokyo Compression #55, 2010
C–print
Sheet 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
Frame 52 x 42 cm (20 1/2 x 16 1/2 in.)
Edition of 9, plus 2 AP; Ed. no. 2/9
Print only
– Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany. He worked and lived in Paris and Hong Kong where he died in April 2019. The focus of Michael Wolf’s work is life in mega-cities. His projects document both the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Born in Munich, Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe, and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang School with Otto Steinert in Essen, Germany. He moved to Hong Kong in 1994, where he worked for eight years as a contract photographer for Stern magazine. Since 2003, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, publishing over thirty books of his work.
His work is held in many permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and M+ in Hong Kong.
– Tokyo Compression
The politics of looking, and in particular looking upon others’ suffering, sits at the core of Wolf’s candid photographic series. The work prompts not only a reflection on the discomfort before us, but also a self-reflection on our own position as spectator. With city-dwellers framed in states of claustrophobic torment, their anguished faces crushed against the glass pane, the dividing window acts as a literal reinforcement of the commuters’ “otherness”, an ever-present reminder that we are free and they—albeit temporarily—are not. It is a dynamic that is disquietingly symbiotic—our spectatorship depends on their objectification, our agency on their entrapment. We therefore encounter their confinement with an uncomfortable detachment, the commuters representing a condition which is real yet simultaneously distant.
– Michael Wolf, Art, City, Street Photography, Colour Photography, Tokyo, Metro, Portrait, Human, People, Asia, Claustrophobia, Close-up