Michael Wolf, For the Life of the City

Architecture of Density - Hong Kong
(Berlin: Buchkunst Berlin, 2022)

For the new revised edition of Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density, I wrote an essay “For the Life of the City” that places his best known series in the broader context of Michael’s work. Here is an extract:

There are many Michael Wolfs. The provocative agitator of Tokyo Compression who took shots of hapless Japanese commuters asphyxiating in their overpacked train cars like fish in a barrel. The experimental appropriationist who used Google’s nascent Street View technology to develop new forms of urban photography and portraiture. The installation artist who combined vernacular objects with his own photographs to question the globalised system and the relative value of “high” and “low” culture in series including Real Fake Art and The Real Toy Story. The young documentarian too, whom most of us only discovered when the book Bottrop-Ebel 76 was released in 2013—a surprising but fascinating insight into his first steps as a photographer and the influence of Otto Steinert on his thinking about the medium. But at his core, the photographer Michael Wolf was above all a relentless visual collector who devoted the best part of his artistic life to documenting and celebrating the incredible richness of Hong Kong’s unique architecture and vernacular culture.

Michael moved to the city in 1994, subsequently working as a contract photographer for the German magazine Stern. Hong Kong quickly became his muse, its sensory overload planting seeds in his mind that would later grow into some of his most significant photographic projects. Having worked as a photojournalist for over two decades, Michael became increasingly frustrated with the worsening conditions the profession faced. In 2003, he decided to leave the world of journalism and devote himself to an artistic career.

However, rather than turning away from the subjects he had explored for the press, it was by happening upon a radical new aesthetic for his images that Michael was able to shed his photojournalist’s skin. In fact, the first personal project he produced using this new approach—one which launched his artistic career—took place in Michael’s adoptive backyard.

Hong Kong Island’s bristling array of skyscrapers overlooking the city’s harbour against a mountainous backdrop have made the city’s skyline one of the world’s most iconic. However, rather than this glistening glass and steel, Michael found himself drawn to the concrete tower blocks in the Kowloon areas of Sham Shui Po and Shek Kip Mei, which housed thousands upon thousands of residents and made Hong Kong one of the densest cities on the planet. The series of images he produced in these locations became known under the title Architecture of Density.