Candida Höfer
Eberswalde (Germany), 1944

Candida Höfer was educated at the Werkkunstschule of Cologne before enrolling, in 1973, in the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf where she stayed until 1982. While at this institution, Candida Höfer first studied cinema with Ole John, specialising in photography in 1976, under Bernd and Hilla Becher. She is currently considered one of the most representative members, along with Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff, of the New School of German Photography, which emerged in the late eighties. Between 1997 and 2000, Candida Höfer was a teacher at the Hochschule für Gestaltunt de Karlruhe. Following the work method initiated by her mentors, her photographs demonstrate an almost ethnographic interest in the multiplicity of forms of presentation in contemporary culture, with a special emphasis on the stages where society and knowledge are developed, these being the main themes of her photography since the decade of the eighties. Throughout her career, this artist has increasingly focused her production on capturing different types of public or semi-public interiors, such as book shops, palaces, museums, offices, universities, libraries cafeterias, churches, sports complexes and zoos. Her compositions, generally in medium-scale format, are carefully considered and simple, recalling the minimalist tradition and rendering clean and neutral images in which the artificial lighting of the spaces usually combines with the sunlight filtering through the windows (Kunthaus Bregenz I, 1999). The artist does not retouch the images; the places are portrayed just as they are. The photograph captions convey this same idea of compositional clarity: with brevity and precision, she identifies the space or the building represented, its function, its location and the date the photograph was taken. The result is the creation of a calm and simple photographic atmosphere, very attractive for the spectator. Höfer neither aims to aggrandise nor to belittle the spaces but merely to capture their historical significance, however slight and private that may be, in the present. Despite having admitted on several occasions to her fascination with human behaviour, in Candida Höfer’s photographs, there is never any trace of it. The artist thus portrays the empty rooms, always from the point of view of the hypothetical spectator, whereby the spaces seem ready to accept their customary occupants. Early images such as Liverpool from 1968 or Türken in Deuschtland from 1980, in which there were some isolated personages within view, are long behind her now. The artist has recognised that her intention, through this “dehumanising” manoeuvre, is to seize the aura and the revealing nature of the spaces represented. In this context, the objects seem to magically rise above their habitual space, abandoning the physical limits of representation to display the traces deposited by time, while simultaneously demonstrating how individuals of our time build and equip their edifices. A. S.

Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin VIII, 2002

This work by Candida Höfer represents an image of the interior of one of the most well-known buildings by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). To be precise, it depicts the space destined to house the German State’s XX century painting and sculpture collection, which includes pieces produced as late as the seventies. The image is serene and peaceful, the building seemingly sleepy, with no spectators to distract from the clarity of its forms. The sunlight streaming through the windows in the background brightens the enormous exhibition hall.
The building Höfer photographed is currently considered one of most representative examples, along with the Barcelona Pavilion, of the Van der Rohe movement, the International Style. Consistent with his constructive convictions, between 1965 and 1968 the architect designed a rigorously planned and utterly elegant building. As it was to be used as a museum space, he designed a geometric structure of steel and glass, whose interior unfolded diaphanous spaces for exhibiting the works.
In some way, Candida Höfer’s work, as that of her mentors Bernd and Hilla Becher, can be considered to be owing to the expressive language invented by “Mies” in architecture. Its simplicity in representing spaces, its rejection of fictitious intervention on the image, the placement of the camera at the spectator’s eye level…, all indicate a search for an objective, aseptic and distanced photographic code when recording reality. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, in Höfer’s work we can sense the presence of beings inhabiting and arranging those spaces on a daily basis. The spectator is lulled into a pleasant, relaxed state where nothing interrupts contemplation. In this way, the perceptive calm allows for the establishment of multiple, perhaps even endless associations between the images, him/herself becoming the curious investigator of contemporary culture and ways of life. A. S.

F. Hoffmann – La Roche AG Basel II, 2002

We are now located inside a building. In this case, Candida Höfer has represented one of the spaces built by the Swiss architect O.R. Salvisberg (1882-1940) for the multinational pharmaceutical company F. Hoffman-La Roche AG in Basel, Switzerland. We are in a semi-public interior, an office building rather than a museum space.
Höfer’s camera is again placed in the centre of the space, at the height of a regular guest or occupant’s viewpoint. The long corridor portrayed surprises the spectator by the purity and simplicity of its architectural design. In the background, a decorative plant mural acts as perceptive limit. The light shines into the space through the picture windows in the upper left part of the space, while the whiteness of the walls reinforces the clarity of the view. On the right, the showcases, located between doors, display receptacles –pharmaceutical bottles- that offer keys to the discovery of the place’s function: a passageway, a corridor in a business environment, where it is unlikely that people dwell for long. If they were to do so, the benches on the left side of the image would offer a place to rest.
In the categories of recent history, Candida Höfer’s work is most often considered portraiture of spaces pertaining to contemporary society. However, as the artist herself has recognised, her production does not pursue a single purpose, but cleverly and subtly permits a glimpse of life and ways of inhabiting spaces, letting us imagine everything the place portrayed denotes in its immutable human void. A. S.