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Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf: The Transparent City Hardcover – November 1, 2008

by Natasha Egan (Author), Geoff Manaugh (Author), Michael Wolf (Photographer)

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Chicago, like many urban centers throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge in new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf as an artist-in-residence to document this phenomenon. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. This is Wolf's first body of work to address an American city. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City, his details are fragments of life--digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged--snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses: Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner. The material

Print length

112 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Aperture/MoCP
Publication date

November 1, 2008
Dimensions

11 x 0.75 x 13.75 inches
ISBN-10

1597110760
ISBN-13

978-1597110761
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The ground is nowhere in sight in Wolf’s dramatically geometric, nearly abstract photographs of Chicago’s Loop towers. Shot from strategically selected rooftops and perfectly printed in an aptly large, vertical book, Wolf’s subtly modulated color photographs are monumental studies in grays, whites, blacks, golds, and occasional splashes of green and blue. Given their elegant grids, nuanced variations, and stillness, these images echo the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, yet this is the real world, and real people inhabit these immense cellular buildings, these boxy hives, these human filing cabinets, and Wolf’s stealthy, intrusive lens finds them, most often alone contemplating a television or computer. The lighting is exquisitely moody, each lit interior is a screen or stage, each human figure as poignant as those in the paintings of Edward Hopper, an artist Wolf, acclaimed for his earlier books on China, cites as an influence. With intimations of surveillance and vulnerability, these intensely beautiful cityscapes seem austere and inhuman until one lands on a magnified picture of a man giving the distant photographer the finger. --Donna Seaman

Review

"...by turns they [the images] dazzle and unsettle. The color images are mostly of contemporary buildings downtown. However, they are more about geometric abstraction and voyeurism than architectural photography. As the text says, Edward Hopper meets 'Blade Runner.' Riveting." -- Alan Artner --Chicago Tribune

"The book... combines impersonal cityscapes shot primarily at dusk or at night with details of the buildings' inhabitants that become impressionistic because of the pixilation from extreme enlargement. Mr. Wolf added some close-up photographs with a 300-millimeter lens. Together they reveal what is hidden in the broader architectural overviews." -- James Estrin --New York Times, Lens Blog

"On the one hand, Wolf's 'Transparent City' pictures ignite our smoldering anxieties about surveillance and the end of privacy. On the other, the complexities they describe so lucidly assert the ultimate incomprehensibility of the world." -- Kenneth Baker --San Francisco Chronicle

"We are often told that the excitement of living in a city comes from the street. Wolf removes himself from that noisy world and makes his case for the cooler pleasures of observing from a safe distance the almost glacial stillness of urban life." -- Charles Dee Mitchell --Photo-Eye Magazine

"The business guy holding a green stress ball (seen in close-up and framed by his window and drapes) is a blob of protoplasm. In a day or a year or 30 years, he'll be gone, and another blob will replace him. His building, these photos seem to say, will remain." -- Patrick T. Reardon --Chicago Tribune Magazine

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Aperture/MoCP; First edition (November 1, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 112 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1597110760
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1597110761
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11 x 0.75 x 13.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,411,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,407 in City Photography
- #5,069 in Individual Photographers
- #9,290 in Photograpy Equipment & Techniques

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6 ratings

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Shar G

Photography Book

Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2013

Verified Purchase

I own one of Michael Wolf's pieces and LOVE it so the book was a follow-up for me. Very nicely done.

Helpful

John Armstrong

A photographic look at and into the transparent city

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2009

If you have ever been on a fairly high floor in a downtown high-rise office building, apartment/condo complex, or hotel, and looked out the window at night at the other buildings across the way, you will know first-hand what this book is all about. The only difference between you and German photographer Michael Wolf is that while you were in a nice warm room he was out on rooftops and parking lot top-levels freezing his butt off - he took most of the pictures in Nov-Dec in windy Chicago to get the early darkness. (You can actually see remnants of snow in one or two pictures.)

The main images are all fundamentally architectural, taken with a camera with movements or with a lens with movements that give perfect precision to the vertical and horizontal lines. Some images are pure minimalist planes, some show interesting reflections off the glass, some show brightly lit interiors, and some - the most interesting - show people in those brightly lit interiors.

If there is any question about the project, it is whether the artist was right to go for this mix or whether he should have concentrated on the last type - the ones with the people - and made a study of building-to-building voyeurism in the big city. I think the latter, but people's opinions will vary.

Whichever, he does highlight the voyeuristic theme by including a sampling of highly magnified images of some of the people visible through the windows. I personally don't like this part of series. Having seen Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" I realize that the right way to present the views would have been to give people magnifying glasses and let them find them for themselves. (I am only half joking.)

The series is filled with images that capture details of life in the urban sky. I won't try to list them, it's more fun to discover them for yourself. There are, however, two images that must not be missed. One, occurring around the middle of the book, has a wonderful touch - actually two - of self-referentiality. People familiar with photography should have no trouble spotting them.

The other, occurring at the end of the book and I hope also the exhibition - in any case you should see it last - shows a view out of the other side of the building, the view not into the city but out of it. If you know Chicago you will instantly recognize it. It is a view of the real world.

The book is large format (13.5 x 10.8 in = 34.3 x 27.4 cm) and the images are very sharp and clean. Many spread across two pages and are divided by the gutter, which can be troubling, but it seems a reasonable price to pay for maximum size.

The book also contains a brief introduction by Nastasha Egan of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago (co-publisher of the book along with Aperture) and a thoughtful and entertaining essay by Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell Magazine.

I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys photography, particularly architectural, night, and cityscape photography, as well as to anyone who wants a peek into life in the high-rise world of Chicago and other big cities. Five stars.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robin

The core of Chicago

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2009

The thirty-nine cityscape photos in the book, when you first look at them, might seem sort of dull. Several show only the front of buildings at dusk and others, taken in the late afternoon darkness, show an office environment with people at their desks. Keep looking though and a whole kaleidoscope of shapes and pictures within pictures start to emerge. Wolf, by zooming into buildings and not showing the roof or the street, concentrates on lines of lit windows and the building structure to create a dazzling effect.

It all seems visually obvious but I wonder if Chicago has the only core of contemporary office blocks where this type of photo could be taken? I recently reviewed New York Vertigo by French photographer Michel Setboun which has some slightly similar night shots of Manhattan but lacks the creative vision that Wolf has displayed in his amazing photos.

Remarkable though the work is I was rather disappointed by some of the book's editorial judgment. There are twenty-three (mostly seven by five inches) highly enlarged and therefore very pixilated photos of activity seen through the windows. They fill a little of several spreads leaving the rest of the space blank and to my mind contribute nothing to the overall feel of the building photos. The first twelve pages have seven of them virtually blank except for a few words in display type. The page numbers are laid sideways which means that a short black line has to be used to indicate a six from a nine, many pages have no numbers because the photos extend past the page margins (but don't bleed off the page) all this is just designer whimsy and is no help to the reader.

I think it's unfortunate that the publisher's have rather diluted the impact of Wolf's great photos with some amateurish editorial ideas.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Robin

The core of Chicago

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 21, 2009

Verified Purchase

The thirty-nine cityscape photos in the book, when you first look at them, might seem sort of dull. Several show only the front of buildings at dusk and others, taken in the late afternoon darkness, show an office environment with people at their desks. Keep looking though and a whole kaleidoscope of shapes and pictures within pictures start to emerge. Wolf, by zooming into buildings and not showing the roof or the street, concentrates on lines of lit windows and the building structure to create a dazzling effect.

It all seems visually obvious but I wonder if Chicago has the only core of contemporary office blocks where this type of photo could be taken? I recently reviewed 'New York vertigo' (ISBN 978 0810995116) by French photographer Michel Setboun which has some slightly similar night shots of Manhattan but lack the creative vision that Wolf has displayed in his amazing photos.

Remarkable though the work is I was rather disappointed by some of the book's editorial judgment. There are twenty-three (mostly seven by five inches) highly enlarged and therefore very pixilated photos of activity seen through the windows. They fill a little of several spreads leaving the rest of the space blank and to my mind contribute nothing to the overall feel of the building photos. The first twelve pages have seven of them virtually blank except for a few words in display type. The page numbers are laid sideways which means that a short black line has to be used to indicate a six from a nine, many pages have no numbers because the photos extend past the page margins (but don't bleed off the page) all this is just designer whimsy and is no help to the reader.

I think it's unfortunate that the publishers have rather diluted the impact of Wolf's great photos with some amateurish editorial ideas.

2 people found this helpful

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Michael Wolf: The Transparent City Hardcover – November 1, 2008

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