Michael Wolf, born 1954, is a German artist and photographer who resides in and works in Hong Kong and Paris. Wolf’s work focuses on the daily life within big cities such as Hong Kong. Wolf one first prize in the Contemporary Issues category of the 2004 World Press Photo competition for his photographs of workers in several types of factories. His career began in 1994 as a photojournalist, when he spent eight years working in Hong Kong for German magazine ‘Stern’. Wolf says that a decline in the magazine industry led to photojournalism assignments becoming “stupid and boring” therefore he decided to work on only fine-art photography projects from 2003.

In Wolf’s series titled “Architecture of Density” he photographs Hong Kong’s tall buildings in order to show them as “abstractions, never-ending repetitions of architectural patterns” – the photographs excluded the sky and the ground and so emphasised the vertical lines and shapes within the buildings. The first book containing images from the series, Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door, was published in 2005 – in this book reviews noted how the photographs represented the overpopulation occurring in the city and the massiveness of the human presence.

I intend to take a lot of inspiration from Wolf’s work on ‘Architecture of Density’ as I believe that his work on this project brilliantly demonstrates the similarity within buildings through the patterns that are demonstrated within them as well as bringing light to how different the buildings all are, even though they all often contain very similar shapes and structures. I like Wolf’s work a lot due to the patterns and repetition within the photographs, I feel that they create a very intriguing and abstract appearance to the work as you are initially unsure at what you are looking at. Of course Wolf creates this work using much larger buildings and so can further dramatise these effects of massive repetitive buildings so in my responses to this work it will likely be necessary to use photoshop in order to create more repetition to achieve the same effect as Wolf has. Ultimately Wolf shows the repetition within the world we live in as well as showing the fact that even though there are so many buildings built for the same purpose, they all manage to have their own individualistic features.

Analysis

In this photograph from Wolf’s “Architecture of Density” he has used the natural lighting from the city of Hong Kong in order to capture a photograph of a repetitive and colourful high-riser apartment block. By using the natural lighting he has been able to capture the natural tonal ranges and contrasts within the building as well as being able to ensure that the image depicts the city of Hong Kong accurately. A deep depth of field would have been used to capture this photograph of the repetitive apartment block face; this is obvious as all aspects of the photograph are in focus in order to ensure that the viewer can look throughout the photograph and spot the continuing patterns. A fairly quick shutter speed, such as 1/80 will have been used to capture the photograph along with a low ISO of close to 100. This is because Wolf will have altered settings of the camera so that the correct amount of light was entering the lens from the city and that the quality of the photograph was as high and as noise-free as possible. This has led to a photograph that is corrected exposed and is visually pleasing to look at.

There is plenty of colour throughout the photograph due to the colourful panels placed across the apartment block; despite this there is not much saturation in the colours as they seem quite bleak and faded. To me this has been done on purpose by Wolf to suggest that this high-density, repetitive type of apartment block is not a sustainable or enjoyable way of living and represents how the population of Hong Kong feel about their living situation – it all seems quite bleak and boring as there is no room for innovation. There is a good level of contrast between the tones within the photograph as there are plenty of black tones within the shadows of balconies contrasting with the lighter tones of the coloured panels – this contrast increases the drama within the photograph to create a more striking composition. Due to the flat nature of the face of the apartment block there is a very 2D feeling to this photograph, but it does not take away from the effectiveness of the photograph as it further demonstrates the repetition and patterns shown throughout the apartment block.

This photograph is part of Wolf’s “Architecture of Density” in which he photographs Hong Kong’s tall buildings in order to show them as “abstractions, never-ending repetitions of architectural patterns”. The project included books published, including Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door which allowed Wolf to present the photographs collectively to prompt the reader to compare the structures, shapes and colours within the different Hong Kong high-risers and therefore demonstrated variance and similarity in his work. As a whole this work shows how over-populated and dense cities such as Hong Kong are and gives an insight into their lifestyle and possibly the bleakness of it. This work also possibly raises questions about what the human population are going to do in the future as human population constantly rises and we run out of space in these large cities. Property prices are inevitably going to rise as this unsustainable approach continues and it is just an amount of time until the demand for housing increases drastically past the supply of housing.