Michael Wolf, the German-born photographer who captured Hong Kong as a place of both incredible development and otherworldly quiet, has passed away at his home in Cheung Chau. He was 65.
His death was confirmed on Thursday by the Photomuseum of the Hague, which collaborated with Wolf on his first major retrospective in 2017.
Wolf’s best-known work is likely the collection “Architecture of Density,” a study of Hong Kong’s vast housing blocks, whose seemingly endless rows of windows evoke an eerie alien megalopolis.
Wolf described his approach to the project in a 2016 interview with Yitiao Video (below).
“If you look at the photographs, they all have a certain stylistic device, which is that you do not see the horizon, and you do not see the sky,” he said. “You do not have an idea of how big it is. It could be five times as big, or twenty times as big, or a hundred times as big. I had created a metaphor for megacities.”
But despite the massive scale of the photos’ subjects, and their notable lack of people, Wolf maintained that his interest lay in what was going on within the towering concrete walls.
“Behind every window there’s a family or a human being, and you imagine, how did they live?” he said.
Wolf, who was born in Germany and grew up in the US and Canada, first moved to Hong Kong in 1994 as a photojournalist. For many years, his work was primarily on the mainland, where he typically spent half of each year working on projects.
In 2003, he later recalled, Wolf came to the realization that after nine years in Hong Kong, he had never photographed it. “Guilty” at the omission, he set off to document life in his adopted home, and “walked the city, really, from 6 [in the morning] until 6 in the evening.”
That exploration led to what could be seen as a counterpoint/companion to “Architecture of Density”: “Back Door,” a series of photos of Hong Kong’s alleyways that suggest an oddly serene hidden world.
“The streets of Hong Kong are incredibly busy, but as soon as you go into a back alley, it’s incredibly quiet,” he said. “For me the back alleys became my favorite way of walking through Hong Kong.”
The photos of drying mops, slapdash chairs, and hanging gloves create a sense of intimacy with the alleys’ inhabitants, even if their presence is often only evoked by what they’ve left behind.
“People have always asked me, why don’t you photograph the people in the back alleys?” Wolf said. “And I said, not necessarily. I think the things that they use and the traces that they leave reveal much more about the people in the back alleys.”
Wolf is survived by his wife, Barbara, and son, Jasper.
