After moving on from a successful career in photojournalism in 2003 to pursue his personal work, the photographer Michael Wolf, who has died unexpectedly aged 64, devoted himself to exploring the complex nature of life in some of the world’s largest cities. Michael was best known for his series Architecture of Density (2003-14), which focused on the facades of Hong Kong’s landmark postwar tower blocks.
These ominous concrete structures have none of the dazzling sheen of Hong Kong’s iconic harbour skyline, but rather reflect the difficult living conditions of the working class in one of the world’s densest cities. By cropping out the sky and occluding the horizon – a “no-exit” approach that he would use throughout his work – Wolf turned these buildings into seemingly infinite formal abstractions while inviting the viewer to reflect on the lives that they contain.
Hong Kong became Michael’s central photographic subject. In parallel to Architecture of Density, over the last 16 years he created a vast collection of images taken in the labyrinthine network of alleyways running between the city’s buildings. Entitled Informal Solutions, in reference to the resourcefulness of those who frequented these spaces, this series documents the extraordinary vernacular life of the back alleys.
Using a typological approach, Michael photographed lost items of laundry caught on pipes, serpentine networks of ventilation ducts, mops, rubber gloves and umbrellas hung out to dry, twisted coat hangers, small improvised shrines, “bastard chairs” — the name he gave to the patched-up seating arrangements workers had devised — and combinations of all of these elements into what appear to be accidental sculptures.
While his two major series focused on the city’s architecture in all its forms rather than its inhabitants, Michael was above all driven by an “extreme curiosity about people”. “I was always on the side of the underdog,” he said in 2014, in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Over time, Michael became recognised as the foremost photographer of Hong Kong’s urban ecosystem. He was keenly aware of the documentary importance of his project and wanted his work to help preserve what he saw as a neglected facet of Hong Kong’s heritage. This commitment was met with surprise in some local circles as he had arrived as an outsider.
Born in Munich, Michael soon emigrated with his parents to the US. He grew up in a creative environment, as his father and mother, Arne and Anna, both practised and taught art. He described himself as coming “from a politically active liberal family”, an engaged stance that remained central to his work both as a journalist and as an artist.
In 1972–73 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Germany to study under the photographer and teacher Otto Steinert, the founder of the subjective photography movement, at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. After graduating in 1976, Michael built a successful career as an independent photojournalist in Germany before moving to Hong Kong as a contract photographer for Stern magazine in 1994. He married Barbara Herrmann there three years later.
While Hong Kong became his muse and the place where he established himself as an artist, he always aimed to expand beyond this territory, to deal with the issues raised by urbanisation on a global scale. Hong Kong provided him with a unique vantage point on neighbouring China, where he photographed his series Real Fake Art (2007) and The Real Toy Story (2004), an immersive installation in which he integrated his portraits of workers in Chinese toy factories into a wall display made up of thousands of “Made in China” toys.
He also undertook projects in Europe and the US. In 2006, when visiting Chicago to install an exhibition, he was struck by the transparency of the city’s modernist architecture, made of glass and steel. This discovery led to the series Transparent City (2006), which adopted a similar visual approach to Architecture of Density, but went beyond the buildings’ surfaces to examine the lives within.
After Barbara accepted a post in Paris in 2008, Michael began to divide his time between that city and Hong Kong. This move proved difficult for him, as the French capital’s Haussmannian architecture seemed impenetrable and frozen in time; unlike Hong Kong, it bore few signs of contemporary life.
Unable to find a way to photograph Paris, he resorted to exploring the streets using Google’s recently introduced Street View navigation. This opened up a fresh perspective on the city and allowed him to develop a new form of street photography based on crops made from behind his computer screen. He went on to use the Street View tool in a number of other projects.
Throughout his career the photobook played a central role in Michael’s work, particularly through the close relationship he forged with the Berlin-based publisher and bookseller Hannes Wanderer, who published under the Peperoni Books imprint and who died in 2018.
Together they produced 17 books between 2009 and 2018, including Tokyo Compression (2010), a claustrophobic portrait series made in the Tokyo subway at rush hour in which the density of human bodies replaces that of architecture.
In 2017 his first retrospective, Michael Wolf – Life in Cities, opened at the Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, before travelling to The Hague Museum of Photography, the Fondazione Stelline in Milan and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.
While Michael had regularly exhibited his photographs since the mid-2000s, this was the first exhibition to bring all his major series together. Life in Cities revealed not only the extent of the visual archive he had built up in Hong Kong but also established him as an important voice on the phenomenon of global urbanisation.
The final series that Michael completed was Cheung Chau Sunrises. A departure from his previous work, its images were taken on Cheung Chau, a small, idyllic island six miles south-west of Hong Kong Island, where Michael had taken a flat to escape from the chaos of the city. These meditative, elated images of the sun rising over the sea were taken from his rooftop.
He is survived by Barbara and their son, Jasper.
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