«I was always on the side of the underdog». Photographer Michael Wolf’s work highlights the absence of private and public space in metropolises
Life of Michael Wolf
German photographer Michael Wolf earned fame by casting a raw image of urban life in megacities. His photographs unmask the hidden lives of the common people in some of the world’s most complexly dense cities.
While some find beauty in his photos, others find brutality. His rigorous and objective style captured the consequences of massive urbanization and modernization on contemporary civilization.
Born in 1954, Wolf began his career as a photojournalist for Stern Magazine. Due to its location, the photographer resided in Hong Kong for many years, traveling to Mainland China to pursue his work. However, as he often described, the turning point in his career began when the region was struck by the SARS epidemic, leading Wolf to realize more artistic projects.
From 2003 until his passing in 2019, Wolf photographed cities and their inhabitants, finding symbolic value in seemingly insignificant details that create the skin of a city. His work raised questions on massive urbanization, the everyday rituals of the working classes, and the architecture they reside in.
His continuous examination of people’s movement between the private and public spaces has been the central theme of his photography, which he explored with diverse perspectives and visual approaches.
Architecture of Density
Much of the history of Hong Kong’s sociological and economic textures can be examined from the symmetric faces of the buildings Wolf captures in his most famous collection of works, titled Architecture of Density.
A striking study of the concrete skin of the world’s most vertical city, the photographs are taken from the most apparent viewpoint, looking straight ahead. By using the no exit photography technique, the photographer consciously eliminates the sky and horizon, focusing solely on the buildings and leaving the audience questioning the massive structures’ actual size. The result is a collection of geometric high-rise apartment buildings absent from their inhabitants.
Using the uniformity of their architectural compositions to great effect, the confined living spaces are embedded with political and sociological undertones as they portray the brutal living conditions working-class residents endure, raising a question about urbanization in the post-war megacities.
By highlighting the city’s landmark structures, the photographs reveal the architectural consequences that have emerged from the Hong Kong government’s strategy to sustain a property dominant development achieved through renting very few amounts of land to the highest bidders.
According to the Planning Department of Hong Kong, only seven percent of the land area is used for residential buildings, making it one of the densest places in the world. As a result, space becomes the ultimate form of luxury in the region, rising to costly proportions. The private space is squeezed into almost inhabitable circumstances, leaving most residents to depend on public housing and endure substandard living conditions.
While the massive concrete towers act as a protagonist in the images, the audience is left to imagine the thousands of lives that are contained within each frame. At first sight, any sign of life seems to be absent in the photos. Still, on closer look, a shirt hanging to dry, a small plant placed in front of a window, small symbols of individuality reveal themselves amongst the condensed structures, creating an intersection between the private and public life.
100 x 100, Micheal Wolf’s next project
The lives hidden within the buildings inspire Wolf’s next project, titled 100 X 100. This time, the photographer follows a more journalistic approach, documenting the interior of one hundred rooms and its inhabitants in an old public housing complex that measures precisely one hundred square feet.
As all inhabitants are photographed in the rooms they live in, Wolf invites the viewers to read the history and character of the personas from the surrounding environments they are present. The cramped-up objects commonly found in every room, from a rice cooker to a Chinese calendar, act as cultural identifications of the Hong Kong people.
The overwhelming number of materials in every room intensifies the lack of private living space. Moreover, it brings into question how people use the limited areas within the concrete walls. Here, Wolf’s concern for the human cost becomes more evident, as he once described in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2014, « I was always on the side of the underdog».
Tokyo Compression
The compression of space takes a more gripping form in Wolf’s next project, ‘Tokyo Compression’. The photo series studies the people living in the suburbs who ride the overcrowded subway systems every day to get to their place of work during rush hours in Tokyo.
The human bodies crammed in the subway trains give the impression of feeling trapped and claustrophobic. As the passengers close their eyes and try to hide from the camera, the intrusive approach to photograph the subjects at such close distance creates an unsettling and discomforting reaction from the passengers. Their struggle to endure this everyday ritual is further projected in their faces pressed against the subway windows, revealing their vulnerability.
The striking element in the photos is once again the absence of space, but this time the density source is not architectural but human. In Tokyo Compression, Wolf unveils the simple misery routines weighing in on working-class residents living in hyperdense cities. Like his previous projects, urbanization is criticized as artificial structures are built with little attention to the human cost, forcing the residents to adapt their way of life to these environments, as opposed to the other way around.
In an interview with the Chinese video channel Yit in 2016, Wolf explains the inspiration behind Tokyo Compression, «Living in the city itself is too expensive, so you have to move to the suburbs, move further away. Every day is commuting like a sardine, pressed into a train. An hour and half in, hour and a half out. Imagine you work eight hours or nine hours. That’s another three hours you spend standing here, looking at your iPhone. It’s a miserable way to live, I think. I wanted to show how horrific and depressing life in megacities can be. It’s another façade of life in megacities».
Google Street Views
One of the most debatable projects that Wolf has completed in his life comes from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Challenging the traditional notions of street photography, Wolf places his camera in front of his computer screen and captures his subjects from Google’s online database of street view images. The result is a collection of pixelated and blurred photos documenting unfortunate events that Google coincidentally recorded.
Since its launch in 2007, Google Street Views maps interactive road panoramas that cover most of the world’s surface, allowing users to take virtual tours in even the most remote places. By recognizing Google Street Views as a digital medium, Wolf emphasizes the vulnerability of privacy in modern cities and sheds light on Google’s production of unauthorized photographic maps of the world.
The series also touches upon a much-discussed conversation in the future of urban planning. The increasing integration of surveillance technologies in public spaces. Surveillance technologies have become desirable and valuable tools for governments to monitor the movements of their citizens. In exchange for security, order, and safety, residents unwillingly give up their data and privacy to third parties, eliminating anonymity in their public life.
Wolf’s adaptation of this new photographic technique reveals the growing intrusion and documentation of civic life, which may jeopardize civil and personal freedoms, giving away to a more suppressed and controlled form of living in megacities in the future.
Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany. He obtained a degree in visual communication at the University of Essen, Germany, studying with Otto Steinert. In 1994, Wolf moved to Hong Kong and pursued a career as a photojournalist for Stern Magazine. In 2001, he began focusing on personal works, documenting metropolises’ architecture and vernacular culture. He passed away in 2019 in Cheng Chau, Hong Kong.
