Candida Höfer: Bologna Series

German photographer Candida Höfer makes large-format photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture the "psychology of social architecture." In this small volume, her photographs of libraries maintain their monumental feel. They are sober and restrained, disturbed by neither visitors nor users, though Höfer forgoes any staging of the locations. As Michael Kimmelman writes in The New York Times, "Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form."
Born in 1944, German photographer Candida Höfer is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher's at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Her work was recently seen at a one-person show at the ICA Philadelphia.