In 2004 Wolf gained international recognition as a world-class art photographer with “Architecture of Density,” his highly acclaimed series of large-scale photographs of Hong Kong residential buildings. He won the first prize in the World Press Photo Award Competition in 2005 and 2010 and an honorable mention in 2011. In 2010, Wolf was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. Wolf’s photographs are held in numerous important 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, Essen and the German Museum for Architecture, Frankfurt.
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| Architecture of Density #119 (2009) |
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| Architecture of Density (2009) |
In 2014, Wolf told the BBC: "As a photojournalist, I was always aware of composition in my photographs, and one of the things I always liked doing was not letting the viewer be able to escape from the picture. So as soon as you have sky there, you look up and you can leave the picture in some form. "It's the same with the architecture. If you have the sky and the horizon, you know approximately how big it is, and there's no real illusion there. By cropping it like that, I'm not describing the building any more, I'm creating a metaphor."
Michael Wolf is known for capturing the hyper-density of the city of Hong Kong in his large-scale photographs of its high-rise architecture. In his series Tokyo Compression, Wolf centers on the subsurface crush of the Tokyo subway, in which thousands of commuters make their daily journeys between work and home.
"I spent more than 60 weekday mornings photographing passengers during their commute into Tokyo. All portraits were taken at one train station along the Odakyu line, during rush hour between 7.30 and 9 am. At intervals of 80 seconds, a train already packed to the absolute limit pulled into the station. People pushed their way into the compartments even more until the commuters were jammed like sardines in a can. Day in and day out, millions of commuters must endure this torture, as the only affordable housing is hours away outside of the city center. Is this a humane way to live?"
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Michael Wolf/Peperoni Books, Berlin/Asia One Book, Hong Kong |
Wolf exploited the evocative potential of abstraction, cutting and reframing his images to better capture the subjects. The pictures from my point of view represent imprisonment and pressure on something. With the skin pressed against the window, perhaps a commuter's face, this image is partially blurred, partially obscured by condensation on the glass, or deliberately shielded from other surgical masks. Closed eyes and headphones reflect an internalized retreat from discomfort and overcrowding as if suspending time until the end of the journey, while some passengers close their eyes tightly in a gesture of resistance to being photographed. We know that he took these photos for sure without people's consent.
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