Born in Germany and raised in the United States and Canada, Michael Wolf returned to Germany to study photography and then spent the majority of his career in Asia, producing work that transcends convention. The distinguishing factor of Wolf’s photographs is his acute ability to find symbolic value in the seemingly insignificant details which so often go unnoticed. From this perspective, Wolf’s body of work deals with the universal reality of contemporary city life.
Finding One’s Calling
Wolf started small as a photojournalist,working in Asia for over a decade for a fairly well-known German magazine. While shooting his final photo story for the magazine, he became inspired to start his first major art project. Wolf developed the idea around plastic toys, which had always fascinated him since they were off-limits to him as a child. Over a period of one month he collected over 20,000 “Made in China” toys through any means possible, including scavenging through second-hand stores and flea markets up and down the coast of California. He then transformed this vast collection into an installation, like the movie ‘Toy Story’ but real. Wolf also integrated photographs of workers in China’s toy factories onto a series of walls covered entirely in plastic toys of all kinds.
The result was an overwhelming, immersive experience; a graphic representation of the gargantuan scale of China’s mass production and the West’s never-ending demand for disposable products. The faces of the factory workers humanize this anonymous ocean of toys and invite us to reflect on the reality of trade in a consumer-driven world. The aspiring artist gained some of his famous characteristics in this first project: obsessive collecting, recognizing the symbolic power of the vernacular, the combination of both macro and micro perspectives, and the ability to use a specific subject or focus to document the broader transformations of urban life.
Architecture of Density
Fast-forward to recent times: in his best-known series on Hong Kong’s highly compressed, often brutal architecture, Wolf uses the city’s skyscrapers to great effect, eliminating sky and horizon lines to flatten each image and turn these façades into seemingly never-ending abstractions. Beyond the stark beauty of these compositions, Wolf’s studies of the thick concrete skin of the city make us wonder about the thousands of lives contained within each frame.
His work on the architecture of Hong Kong can also be linked to the new photographic approaches that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The landmark 1975 exhibition, new topographic of digitally manipulated landscapes, brought together a group of photographers who, in the sprawling post-industrial landscapes of the new American West, found a mirror for the transformation of the structure of American society. In the same way, Wolf found inspiration in Hong Kong and China, places where ever-shifting cityscapes provided him with constant stimulation and the opportunity to document the many faces of this emerging superpower.
During the editing process for the series, Wolf became fascinated by the glimpses of people’s lives visible through the windows of the buildings he had photographed. He painstakingly scoured every inch of these cityscapes to find human details to pair with his architectural images, blowing these details up into highly pixilated, large-scale tableaux. By juxtaposing the photographic equivalents of a microscope and a telescope, he highlights an underlying tension. Shot during the early days of the global financial crisis, the monumental size and sleekness of the buildings contrast with the fear and fragility on the pixilated faces of their occupants. In one of these magnifications, a man gives Wolf the “bird” from his window, presumably having spotted the photographer perched on a rooftop with his camera. As opposed to the formal detachment of his early work, images like this one begin to suggest the role of the photographer as a voyeur, which Wolf acknowledges with a dramatic image that is homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s rear window.
