Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf – The Life of the City

Since his first personal project, Michael Wolf has developed a unique body of work on life in the city encompassing China, Hong Kong, Chicago, Paris and Tokyo. Although his landscape photographs of Hong Kong and Chicago have received the most recognition to date, the scope of his work goes far beyond the architecture of the contemporary city. Wolf’s interest in the city’s surface is driven by an underlying fascination with the lives beneath it. Beyond the formal structure of the urban environment, Wolf’s camera reveals the manifestations of human life within it, combining different scales, perspectives and visual approaches to present a complex vision of the dynamics of the urban organism.

Wolf began his career as a photojournalist, spending over a decade working in Asia for the German magazine Stern. While shooting his final story for the magazine, “China: Factory of the World”, he found the seeds of his first major personal project. Wolf developed the idea around plastic toys, a fascination of his since they were off limits to him as a child. Over a period of several weeks, he accumulated over sixteen thousand ‘Made in China’ toys in second-hand stores up and down the California coast. This vast collection was transformed into an installation, The Real Toy Story, which integrates portraits of workers in China’s toy factories into a series of walls covered entirely in plastic toys of all kinds. The result is an overwhelming, immersive experience; a graphic representation of the gargantuan scale of China’s mass production and the West’s hunger for a never-ending supply of disposable products. The gazes of the factory workers humanise this anonymous ocean of toys and invite us to reflect on the reality of trade flows in a world of abstract globalisation. Many of the major traits that have come to characterise Wolf’s personal work were already present in this first project: obsessive collecting, a recognition of the symbolic power of the vernacular, the combination of both macro and micro perspectives, and the ability to use a specific subject or focus to document the broader transformations of life in the city.

In his best-known series on Hong Kong’s highly compressed, often brutal architecture, Architecture of Density, Wolf uses the city’s sky-scraping tower blocks to great effect, eliminating the sky and horizon line to flatten each image and turn these facades into seemingly never-ending abstractions. Beyond the stark beauty of these compositions, Wolf’s studies of the thick concrete skin of the city make us wonder about the thousands of lives contained within each frame. Although Hong Kong is all but deserted in these images, minute signs of life creep to its surface… a shirt hanging out to dry or the glimpse of a silhouette behind a blind. Despite the stifling compression of this architecture, Wolf’s compositions are laced with evidence of people’s ability and need to express their individuality within these formal structures.

The formalism and deadpan approach of Architecture of Density echoes that which emerged from the Dusseldorf school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, Wolf’s work is driven by a desire to document and connect with the world around him, but with a contemporary visual approach. Contrary to the lyrical drama of ‘classic’ documentary photography, these images are coolly detached from their subject and the photographer’s presence behind the camera is barely perceptible.

This work on the architecture of Hong Kong can also be linked to the new photographic approaches that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The landmark 1975 exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a man-altered landscape, brought together a group of photographers who, in the sprawling post-industrial landscapes of the new American West, found a mirror for the transformation of the structure of American society. In the same way, Wolf thrived in Hong Kong and China, places where ever-shifting cityscapes provided him with constant stimulation and the opportunity to document the many faces of this emerging superpower.

However, contrary to many of the New Topographics photographers, Wolf is not a ‘pure’ photographer of landscape, as is evident from the diverse body of work that he has produced in China. His multi-layered approach is best exemplified by his books Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door and Hong Kong Inside Outside. In the Hong Kong Back Door series, he carves out fragments from the city streets: from workers’ gloves drying on a spiral of barbed wire to the chaotic labyrinths formed by plumbing and ventilation pipes. By using these seemingly insignificant details, Wolf succeeds in capturing the beauty of the vernacular while simultaneously illustrating China’s concern with functionality over form. Although people are almost entirely absent from the series, the barely perceptible traces of their existence present in Architecture of Density take centre stage here. In one image a single red rubber glove placed on top of a metal pole resembles a flag planted in the ground to lay claim to this territory: a sign of space being reclaimed by the city’s inhabitants. With images like this one Wolf sheds light on the seams of the city, the zones where the lack of private space forces the city’s inhabitants to reappropriate public space to fit their basic needs.

In Hong Kong Inside Outside, Wolf pairs the architectural abstractions of Architecture of Density, with 100x100, a study of one hundred interiors in one of Hong Kong’s oldest housing complexes. Titled 100x100 as each apartment in the complex measures exactly one hundred square feet, the series uses a typological approach, adopting the same vantage point for each image, once again evoking the approach of the Bechers and the New Topographics. However, in stark opposition to the distance and formalism of Wolf’s architectural photographs, these images have a quasi-journalistic visual style. Although the inhabitants of these spaces are present in each image, it is not so much their portraits that are striking as the extraordinarily diverse environments that they have constructed for themselves in these standardized spaces. Together with Hong Kong Back Door, the series highlights the ingenuity and adaptability of these citizens and the surprising strength of the city’s organic growth within the confines of its concrete shell.

In the series Bastard Chairs, Wolf once again makes use of a basic facet of urban life in Asia, revealing its symbolic power in relation to the life of the city. The chairs photographed in this series have been patched up, reconfigured, and reappropriated for alternative purposes. They provide a graphic illustration of China’s thriftiness and its devotion to maximising productivity. However Wolf’s attraction to these objects is not only driven by their social significance, but also by the unintentional “beauty inherent in used objects”. His images of these chairs, created purely out to meet the functional need of sitting, celebrate the intelligence of their design and the beauty of their patina caused by years of use. The owners of these chairs do not appear and yet their presence is palpable in this extraordinary array of customised objects, each chair reflecting some aspect of their personality.

This interest in vernacular culture and the obsessive urge to collect echoes the work of the British photographer Martin Parr. Wolf has amassed eclectic and deep collections ranging from plastic toys, to Chinese propaganda posters or cover illustrations of the French weekly newspaper Le Petit Journal. However, whereas Parr’s imagery often contains the suggestion of a certain ridicule, Wolf’s approach is more detached and inclined to seek out the beauty of the vernacular and its symbolic potential in relation to the wider world.

China’s vernacular culture can also be found in the series Real Fake Art. In this series, Wolf focused on the multi-million dollar business that has developed in China for copying major pieces of modern art, from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol, principally for export to the West. These photographs show ‘copy artists’ holding their ‘fakes’, which are often indistinguishable from the original. The work deals with the phenomenon of mass production within the increasingly democratized world of modern art, raising questions about the value of art in the age of mass reproduction and, as with The Real Toy Story, evoking the cultural and commercial flows between China and the West. Interestingly, it is this latter series that led Wolf to undertake his first series of work outside of Asia.

In 2006, when arriving in Chicago to install The Real Toy Story he took the elevated train into the city at dusk and was struck by the transparency of its architecture. After having worked in Asia for many years, Wolf saw Chicago as providing the opportunity to continue his study of city life in a radically different context. Shooting from public rooftops over the course of several months, Wolf adopted a similar visual approach to his Hong Kong architectural work. However, the transparency and monumentality of Chicago’s buildings give a very different result: the city is far less dense than Hong Kong, thereby creating a greater sense of depth to the images, while the transparency of its glass skyscrapers causes the life within them to seep out.

During the editing process for the series, Wolf became fascinated by the glimpses of people’s lives visible through the windows of the buildings that he had photographed. He painstakingly scoured every inch of these cityscapes to find human details to pair with his architectural images, blowing these details up into highly pixellated large-scale tableaux. By juxtaposing the photographic equivalents of a microscope and a telescope, he provides the series with an underlying tension: shot during the early days of the global financial crisis, the monumentality and sleekness of the buildings contrasts with the fear and fragility that is legible on the pixellated faces of its occupants. In one of these magnifications, a man gives Wolf the ‘bird’ from his window, presumably having seen the photographer perched on a rooftop with his camera. As opposed to the formal detachment of his early work, images like this one begin to suggest the role of the photographer as a voyeur, which Wolf acknowledges with a dramatic image containing a homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

These issues of voyeurism and privacy are becoming of crucial importance to modern society—and to the practice of photography within it—and they are a major component of Wolf’s recent work, Paris Street View. In this series, the photographer used Google’s online database of Street View images as the raw material from which to shoot his own photographs. Using Google’s universal interface, he navigates the French capital, cropping and blowing up isolated moments that are both evocative of the classic street photography of the 1950s, but which also transcend the distinctiveness of Paris architecture to suggest an abstract, universal city. With this series Wolf is raising questions about privacy in the modern city and highlighting the double standards relating to current attempts to regulate street photography just as Google is creating an entirely unauthorized photographic map of the world. At a time when a virtually infinite number of images are being produced on a daily basis, he is reasserting the role of the photographer and opening up new avenues for photography to explore.

With his most recent series, Wolf has moved away from the ‘objective’ detachment of his early work to question the role of the photographer within the city. This is perhaps most evident in Tokyo Compression. In this series he thrusts his camera at captive passengers pressed against the windows of the crammed Tokyo subway. These images create a sense of discomfort as his victims attempt to squirm out of view or simply close their eyes, wishing the photographer to go away. Here the density is no longer architectural but human, as commuters fill every available square inch of these subway cars. Tokyo Compression depicts an urban hell and by hunting down these captive passengers with his camera, Wolf is highlighting their total vulnerability to the city at its most extreme.

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In many ways Michael Wolf’s photography is that of an outsider. Born in Germany, raised in California, returning to Germany to study photography before spending the vast majority of his career in Asia, his work cannot be associated with a single school or movement. Perhaps this has contributed to his acute ability to find the symbolic value in those seemingly insignificant details that so often go unnoticed. From this perspective, Wolf has been able to produce a body of work which, beyond the specifics of any single city, deals with the more universal reality of contemporary city life.

Marc Feustel