| | | |  | | | Candida Höfer
Bolshoi Teatr Moskwa II 2017
© Candida Höfer / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 | | | | | Image and Space | | | | Candida Höfer in Dialogue with the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek | | | | | | | 25 March – 28 August 2022 | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | Albert Vennemann
Cinema Capitol, Berlin, 1926
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek | | | | | | Candida Höfer explores built spaces in her photography. Her world-famous interiors focus on libraries, museums, restaurants, theaters, and other public spaces, allowing us to experience architecture in a new way. In comparison with photographic interiors from the Kunstbibliothek's Photography Collection, which is over 150 years old, a dialogue develops between applied photography and artistic work.
With approximately 90 works, the exhibition at Berlin's Museum für Fotografie opens up a broad cross-section of Candida Höfer's photographs from 1980 to the immediate present. The long tradition of her architectural photographs, however, also extends deep into the classical canon of this field of work. In dialogue with pendants and counter-images from the Kunstbibliothek's Photography Collection, Höfer's particular approach to her pictorial motifs is revealed in a particularly impressive way. | | | | | |  | | | Candida Höfer
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library New Haven CT I 2002
© Candida Höfer / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 | | | | | | Spaces with communicative functions are paradoxically shown without the people frequenting them: Candida Höfer demonstrates the qualities or deficiencies of the spaces that enable human exchange in terms of the architecture itself, in terms of the atmosphere she specifically captures in each case, in terms of the perspective and the framing she chooses. She does not focus on the thematic groups serially; the respective locations determine the image format as well as the size of the prints. Yet the compilation of the groups offers a variety of possibilities for comparison that impressively confirm the photographer's longstanding and sustained interest in the specific locations.
Some thematic groups exemplify the visually stimulating dialogue of the images: Facades, windows and doors open and close the view into or out of rooms. The dialogue between the pictures unfolds in a particularly attractive way in the photographs of Berlin's Museumsinsel. While the razor-sharp, large-format contact prints by the Königlich Preußische Messbildanstalt still show the monumental staircase with Wilhelm von Kaulbach's frescoes, Ryuji Miyamoto in 2000 captures the transitory state of the still ruinous building before the start of interior construction, and Candida Höfer in 2009 shows its completion.
Previously unpublished are Höfer's color photographs from her Liverpool series of 1968, from which a thread of development can be drawn to her images of the guest rooms in cafés, hotels, spas, and waiting rooms after 1980. They are brought into conversation with the more journalistically conceived street scenes of Willy Römer and Bernard Larsson, Dirk Alvermann's images of Spanish bar scenes from around 1960, and Helga Paris's photographs of Berlin pubs from the mid-1970s from the Photography Collection. | | | | | |  | | | Eugène Atget
Hôtel du Marquis de Lagrange, Paris, 1901
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek | | | | | | Candida Höfer (*1944) has devoted herself ever more and more intensively to architectural photography since her studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy towards the end of the 1970s. She has concentrated on this important genre without, however, acting on behalf of architects and art historians as photographers of earlier generations did. She sees her work as artistic photography, and photographing interiors was self-determinedly chosen by her as her main field of activity. She herself set the framework for it: "I photograph in public and semi-public spaces from different eras. This are spaces that are accessible to everyone, places of encounter, communication, knowledge, relaxation, recreation. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, since a few years, zoological gardens."
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, ISBN: 978-3-7533-0169-3. | | | | | |  | | | Candida Höfer
Museum A. Koenig IV Bonn 1985
© Candida Höfer / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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© 15 Mar 2022 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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