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Höfer Candida, *1944 (Eberswalde, Germany) Lives in Cologne, works with photography. Banco de España Madrid II,2000 C-print, 152 x 152 cm © 2006, ProLitteris, Zürich Candida Höfer is the only female member of the Becher School, a loose grouping of German photographers including Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Axel Hütte and Andreas Gursky. Bernd and Hilla Becher's black-and-white photography focuses exclusively on documenting industrial buildings and facilities from precise distances and angles. It has been hugely influential since the mid-1960s. Unlike the outsized and sometimes overwhelming townscapes and landscapes by Hütte and Gursky, the large museum photographs by Struth and the larger-than-life portraits by Ruff, Höfer consistently works with a small camera (sometimes with a small wide-angle lens). She avoids tripods and relies on natural light, with her photographs often presented in small formats. |
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Höfer Candida, *1944 (Eberswalde, Germany) Lives in Cologne, works with photography. Hamburger Kunsthalle I,2000 C-print, 152 x 152 cm © 2006, ProLitteris, Zürich Candida Höfer's photographs do not normally feature people, but they always depict public or semi-public places in which people congregate, observe or control one another -- libraries, zoos, waiting rooms, lobbies, university lecture rooms, archives, canteens, dressing rooms or, as in this case, the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Höfer probes the way power is manifested in architectural arrangements. "I am looking for the similar in public spaces, though what attracts me is the difference between these similarities." The absence of people, of any trace of the personal, allows Höfer to foreground the mechanisms by which each institution within the body politic arranges its spaces to assert and consolidate its control over the individual. |