Michael Wolf, who has died suddenly, aged 64, was perhaps best known for his 2013-14 series, Architecture of Density, in which the facades of Hong Kong’s massive tower blocks, each one housing thousands of people, appear as dramatic geometric abstractions of light and colour. Hong Kong’s population density is around 6,987 people per square kilometre, and many of them live in tiny flats in these massive buildings. In Wolf’s photographs, the people are invisible, but on closer inspection, their presence is evident everywhere – in the coloured curtains, the laundry hanging out to dry, the sheets that drape on scaffolding.
The series brought Wolf critical acclaim and positioned him firmly in a German tradition: the detached formalism of the Dusseldorf School – Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and the rest. He was, though, more mischievous and playfully anthropological than that. His subsequent series, 100x100, was, he said, a response to the question he was most often asked about Architecture of Density: “How do people live in there?” The title referred to the number of images he selected, but also to the measurement (10 x 10 feet) of each of the 100 identical designed rooms in the vast Shek Kip Mei public housing complex. Here, amid portraits of the inhabitants, it was the tiny decorative details of each makeshift living space that lent the work its humanity.
Wolf identified the abiding theme of his work as life in cities and his other signature work, Tokyo Compression, captured the claustrophobic experience of the Japanese capital’s subway system during rush hour. Here the hyperdensity of the postmodern city gives way to a series of portraits of individual endurance, with each face pressed tight against the glass of an ominously overcrowded carriage, offering a Ballardian glimpse of a daily ritual that, in Wolf’s portraits, is by turns intimate and unsettling. Some faces are blurred by the condensation on the windows, others stare implacably at his camera or seem lost in reverie. Some simply close their eyes as if to block out his presence. In 2011, Martin Parr included Tokyo Compression in his 30 most influential books of the previous decade.
Born in Germany in 1954, Wolf was brought up in North America and Europe. He studied visual communication at the University of Essen under the influential Otto Steinert, a pioneer of photographic abstraction. Wolf worked as a photojournalist for Stern magazine for almost 10 years, before making the transition to art photographer. His early breakthrough project, The Real Toy Story, comprised of 16,000 Chinese-made toys, which he exhibited by attaching each one individually to the walls of a gallery with magnets. Alongside them, he showcased his portraits of the Chinese conveyor-belt workers who mass-produced the cheap toys for the western market.
Though seldom commented on by art critics, there was a political undertone to Wolf’s work. In several of his best-known series, even the ones where people were an invisible presence, his striking images point to the human cost and extraordinary resilience of contemporary city dwellers caught up in the Darwinian thrust of global capitalism. For every epic project like Architecture of Density, there were intimately observed series’ created during his various trawls through Hong Kong’s back alleys. There, he caught telling glimpses of the city’s makeshift character: customised chairs, surreal arrangements of kitchen mops and wire coat hangers, twisting gas and water pipes, all the mundane everyday objects that speak of the relentless resourcefulness of its residents, and of Wolf’s eye for accidental sculptural beauty amid the seemingly mundane. A detached gaze, yes, but an expressively tender one all the same. It will be missed.
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