Dense and compressed: Life in Hong Kong or Tokyo is challenging for its inhabitants. German photographer Michael Wolf has explored their reality through his award-winning works, now on show in Hamburg.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Advertisement
German photographer Michael Wolf explores cramped life in megacities
Award-winning photographer Michael Wolf depicts the impact of overpopulation through his series of architectural pictures of Hong Kong and portraits of commuters in Tokyo.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
No space in the big city
Close together, Tetris level 12, stale air and no view: These huge housing complexes are painted in different colors to help people keep them apart. Michael Wolf focused on how people live in Hong Kong, his home since 1994, in his "Architecture of Density" photography series.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Feeling trapped
There is no up and no down, it seems as if life were caught between the slabs of the surrounding buildings. No visible sky, no visible earth — the photographer captured a sense of entrapment that leaves the viewer breathless.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Nightmarish living conditions
Michael Wolf aims to document and heighten awareness on how people live in the megacity. As the fourth-most-densely-populated region in the world, housing is scarce and expensive in Hong Kong. It also has the world's largest number of skyscrapers.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Squeezed by urban life
Crowded trains, people's faces pressed against the window panes: Wolf's "Tokyo Compression" series shows close-ups of anonymous and vulnerable commuters. The Tokyo Metro has on average 6.84 million passengers.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Across the window
The "Tokyo Compression" photo series was taken between 2010 and 2013. The photographer took them from a particular train platform that didn't have surveillance cameras. There are strict rules about taking pictures in public places in the Japanese capital.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
A view
Life in the city became too much for Wolf, so he moved to the island of Cheung Chau, which is 10 kilometers southwest of Hong Kong. For the "Cheung Chau Sunrise" series, he took a picture of the sunrise from the rooftop of his home every morning.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
Ocean of plastic toys
In 2005, Wolf won the Word Press Photo award for the above picture, an impressive installation made of 20,000 toys made in China. The colorful plastic array frames a portrait of factory workers.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
A woman's job at the Krups plant
The above photo "Bottrop-Ebel" dates back to 1976, one of Wolf's earliest works. It was taken at a time when the West German Ruhr region was undergoing massive structural change and people worried about their jobs. The series was part of the photographer's final thesis at the Folkwang School in Essen.
Image: Michael Wolf 2018
8 images1 | 8
Monotonous, static, colossal: A large-format photo of a residential complex in Hong Kong reveals neither the sky nor the ground, "giving the viewers of the work the impression that they are right in the middle of this huge metropolis," says Ingo Taubhorn, curator of the exhibition "Michael Wolf: Life in Cities" at the House of Photography in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen art museum.
The retrospective of the award-winning documentary photographer's career includes photos from his beginnings as a student as well as his most recent works, shown publicly for the first time.
Throughout his oeuvre, the photographer has explored topics such as mass consumption, privacy and overpopulation, showing how people live in major cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and Paris.
Visiting Hong Kong's darker side
01:33
This browser does not support the video element.
Painting or photography?
"Michael Wolf does not reinvent photography; he uses it in a very simple way. He approaches reality without manipulating it. He's just an observer, but one with an incredible sense of particular situations," says Taubhorn, who is particularly impressed by the series "Tokyo Compression." "Michael Wolf took these pictures at a specific subway station in Tokyo, photographing people who travel long distances every day to get to their job. The photos are both disturbing and fascinating at the same time."
Another one of the photographer's famous series, "Architecture of Density," is also on show in Hamburg. It focuses on the architecture of Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. As the facades are photographed from a certain distance, the patterns almost create the impression that it's a painting. You only notice upon a closer look that there are people on the balconies, for example hanging their laundry, points out the curator of the exhibition.
A self-portrait of the photographer in the Tokyo subway Image: Michael Wolf 2018
The beginnings
Born in 1954 in Munich, Michael Wolf was given his first camera 14 years later, as a birthday present from his parents.
He spent his childhood and youth in the US and Canada, but studied photography in Essen, Germany, where he then worked as a freelance documentary photographer.
He later moved to Hong Kong, working among other for the German magazine Stern. His stays in major cities such as Hong Kong and Paris, inspired him to further explore the extreme density, anonymity and dynamics of everyday life in megacities.
The exhibition "Michael Wolf: Life in Cities" is on show until March 3 in the House of Photography in Hamburg.
