Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, a small town northeast of Berlin, in the final years of the Second World War. She grew up in postwar Germany, a country engaged in the painful process of physical and cultural reconstruction, and the relationship between architecture, memory, and public life would come to define her entire artistic practice. Höfer initially studied film at the Cologne College of Design, but in 1973 she enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study photography, first under Ole John and then, crucially, under Bernd Becher, whose rigorous, systematic approach to photographic documentation would shape a generation of German artists.

As a student of Bernd Becher, Höfer belonged to a remarkable cohort that included Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, and Axel Hütte — artists who would collectively become known as the Düsseldorf School and who would transform the landscape of contemporary art photography. The Bechers' influence was methodological rather than stylistic: they taught their students to approach their subjects with typological precision, to work in series, and to trust the descriptive power of the photographic medium itself rather than relying on dramatic effects or personal expression. Höfer absorbed these principles but applied them to a subject matter entirely her own: the interior spaces of public institutions.

Her early work in the late 1970s focused on the presence of Turkish guest workers in Germany, a documentary project that examined immigrant communities with quiet attentiveness. But by the early 1980s, Höfer had found the subject that would occupy her for the next four decades. She began photographing the interiors of libraries, museums, opera houses, palaces, university lecture halls, and other public buildings — the spaces in which European culture stores, displays, and transmits itself. These were almost always photographed empty, without human figures, using available light and long exposures that allowed every architectural detail to register with crystalline clarity.

What Höfer discovered in these empty interiors was not emptiness itself but rather the presence of the human in its absence. Her photographs reveal how architecture encodes the values, aspirations, and power structures of the societies that built it. A Baroque library speaks of a different relationship between knowledge and authority than a Modernist reading room. An opera house from the age of absolutism announces different social hierarchies than a contemporary concert hall. By photographing these spaces without the distraction of human activity, Höfer allows the architecture itself to become the subject — and in doing so, she reveals the subtle ways in which space shapes the behaviour and consciousness of those who inhabit it.

Höfer's technical approach evolved significantly over the decades. She began working with a medium-format camera and relatively modest print sizes, but by the late 1990s she had moved to large-format photography, producing prints of extraordinary scale — some as large as two metres across — that envelop the viewer in the depicted space. The shift in scale was not merely technical but conceptual: at this size, the photographs ceased to be representations of spaces and became immersive environments in their own right, overwhelming the viewer with the sheer abundance of architectural detail. The symmetry, the recession of colonnades, the geometry of tiled floors, the fall of natural light through high windows — all of these elements, which might pass unnoticed in the actual spaces, become objects of sustained contemplation in Höfer's photographs.

Her work has been exhibited at the most prestigious institutions in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria. In 2003, she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale, presenting a series of large-format photographs that confirmed her status as one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her books, including In Portugal (2007), Libraries (2005), and Candida Höfer: A Monograph (2003), constitute one of the most sustained and rigorous photographic investigations of institutional space in the history of the medium.

Höfer's influence extends beyond photography into the broader discourse of contemporary art and architecture. Her work raises questions that resonate across disciplines: How do spaces shape the people who use them? What values are embedded in architectural design? What remains when the human presence is removed from a human space? In addressing these questions through the medium of photography, Höfer has produced a body of work that is at once formally beautiful and intellectually rigorous — a testament to the power of the camera to reveal what the eye, in its habitual distraction, so often fails to see.