© Michael Wolf
German photographer Michael Wolf captured in his series “Architecture of Density”, images that acutely acknowledge the landscape’s overwhelming concentration of soaring buildings and skyscrapers in Hong Kong.
In art there’s no rules, you can do whatever you want. With a magazine you’re always confined to pictures on a page. You have an editor, I had an art director, there are certain expectations you have to meet
– Michael Wolf for NewRepublic.com
The Architecture of Density Photographs
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
© Michael Wolf
About Architecture of Density
In this series, Wolf started studying the city of Hong Kong in a personal way after the SARS outbreak in 2002. Despite having lived eight years in the city as a photojournalist for the German magazine Stern, he had never completed a personal project.
“I bundled up wife and son and sent them back to Germany and I stayed in Hong Kong and started working on ‘Architecture of Density,’ so it was basically a situation where I really felt this need to do my own interpretation of the city”
– Michael Wolf for NewRepublic.com
The project turned into an intricate and meticulous study of the megacity. “Architecture of density” is a collection of large-scale works, which focuses on the repetition of pattern and form to cause an infinitely complex visual reaction and rediscovers the city scenes by highlighting its forest-like expanse of high rises.
The work investigates the socio-cultural phenomena of Hong Kong’s rapid expansion and ever-expanding architectural anatomy, while also allowing for an unconventional peer into the inhabitants who occupy it. Wolf’s compositions are laced with evidence of human life — clothes lines, plants, mops and air conditioning units survey.
The photographs excluded the sky and the ground, thereby emphasizing the vertical lines of the buildings. The images have been compared with those of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer.
About Michael Wolf
The focus of the German photographer Michael Wolf’s work is life in mega cities. Many of his projects document the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe, and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and at the folkwang school with otto steinert in essen, Germany. He moved to hong kong in 1994 where he worked for 8 years as a contract photographer for stern magazine. since 2001, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, many of which have been published as books.
[cite]
Good work !