Customer Reviews

Candida Hofer: Architecture Of Absence

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As with other Becher students, Hofer's images are captivating because of their expansiveness and detail - neither of which are reflected in the layout of this book. The images are tiny for no apparent reason. This effectively reduces Hofer's amazing work to a series of oversized postage stamps.

Unless the design is intended as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the title, this dilettante overview is a miserable failure.

I suggest purchasing Candida Hofer, A Monograph. It is large, bold and a substantial compendium of her work.

The collaborative work of Constance W. Glenn, Mary-Kay Lombino, and Virginia Heckert, Candida Hofer: Architecture Of Absence is a spectacular full-color monograph featuring the photos of Candida Hofer, who has taken snapshots of cultural centers such as libraries, museums, theaters, cafes, waiting rooms, universities, and churches for over thirty years. The images reveal structures created to gather, organize, and perpetuate human purpose. An introductory essay guides the reader through the photographer's intent and efforts in capturing such locations on film, but the majority of Candida Hofer: Architecture Of Absence is simply devoted to the sweeping images themselves - empty of people at the time the picture is taken, yet showing rows of seats or broad hallways just waiting to be filled. This is an exceptional and welcome addition to architectural as well as photography collections.

A quiet humor wanders like a ghost through the laconic photos of Candida Höfer -- no people can be seen but via the devices of the rooms, libraries, hotels, halls, museums, canteens -- one can suspect still the existence of human beings indirectly. With a similar humor understanding the physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once wrote: "If the posterity of the year 35.000 (or another planet's class of sensible nature) would find a lady suit completely undone and if they wanted to determine the figure of the ladies who would have been covered with that, -- what figure would come out?" The aesthetic experiments of the German Photographer Candida Höfer activate such associations. One of her book publications is entitled "Room Monuments" (of course without any human being). Before the beginning of her studies (learning from the renowned professors Bernd and Hilla Becher in Duesseldorf, Germany) Candida Höfer had taken photographs of Turkish fellow citizens in business, tea-rooms and parks. The people then disappeared from her photos. Was this the bad influence of her studies with the married couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, who had photographed only the industry architecture of the German Ruhr district maniacally (stubbornly ignoring all that connections between Nazi-politicians and steel-industry, around Hitler and Krupp, Goebbels and Thyssen) ? Or is there hiding a shock, Candida Höfer experienced, as the role of her father, Werner Höfer, a famous TV-talkmaster in the 1960's, was criticized by investigating journalists, checking his own role in the Nazi-era? Did this chase the daughter in a kind of social phobia? Although there is a coffee-table book of Candida Höfer with live (locked in zoo animals) she mostly prefered to make pictures of prepared, dead animal bodies in museum collections. Is such a misanthropic distance necessary to create a counterbalance against traumata, suffered by the modern mass culture? Writers like Canetti (Austria) or Saul Bellow (USA) reacted with comparable feelings -- or philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer (Germany) or Ortega y Gasset (Spain). Perhaps there is a third evident explanation of Candida Höfer's decision how to work (besides the Becher-studies and the father trauma): the minimalist aesthetics theory of the Bauhaus tradition; quiet, empty rooms help to fulfill a meditative, calmed, laconic life-style attitude -- a task to which the painting of Piet Mondrian or Josef Albers also felt obliged -- why not photography as well?