CANDIDA HÖFER

 

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Candida Höfer (*1944) is a german photographer.

From 1973 to 1982 she studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf.
First she was studying film and from 1976 photography under Bernd Becher.
Along with Thomas Ruff, also from the Becher-Class, she was one of the first of Bechers students who took color-photographs and showed her works as slide-projections.

In the beginning Candida Höfer photographed the Turkish Immigrant Workers in Germany at different places like shops, cafés and parks.

Later the people disappeared completely from her photographs.
Höfer began to take color-photographs of interiors of public buildings. First there were rooms like offices, banks or waiting rooms. Later she specialized in large format photographs of "empty" interiors and social spaces.

She has been really interested in representing public spaces such as museums, libraries, national archives of opera houses - devoid of all human presence. 
The presence of human beings has become ever more keenly manifest in her "empty" rooms, attested to by the absence of those for whom the interiors or exteriors were actually built.
Höfers photographs of public spaces are sober and ascetic in feel.
The atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users. There is a great silence in the pictures.Also the colors attract more attention.

Often the photographs present the significant work of famous architects but this seems to be not really important.

If you look to Höfers photographs maybe you can imagine a world without people. Maybe you can just see these "empty" rooms in another way and forget everything what actually happens in these rooms.

BERND & HILLA BECHER

Bernd Becher (*1931; +2007) and Hilla Becher (*1934) are an photographer couple from Germany.

They are really famous for their black&white photographs of framework houses and industrial buildings like watertowers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, winding towers etcetera.
Both oft them studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf from 1957 to 1961.
There they get to know each other and began to work together.

Bernd and Hilla Becher are two of the most influential visual artists of our time.
Since the beginning of the 1960s together they have documented industrial buildings all over the world  with unparalleled systematicness. This passion has resulted photographs that are documents of cultural and technological history from a vanishing industrial era.

The most interesting thing for the Bechers is the fact, that the architecture of these industrial buildings is totally dictated by the function.  
Once Hilla Becher said it is like "sacred architecture of technique".

For the Bechers it is also very interesting, how different the buildings are in different countries.
The buildings have got many small details and that is what the Bechers want to show with  their also very detailed and precise photographs.

Their famous work should not have any social critic, only the documentary work is important for them.

It's all about the different basic forms of these industrial buildings.
That is also the reason, why the Bechers decided to take only black&white photos.
Something like for example a blue sky would only distract.
The best conditions for there photographs were diffused light, as little shadow as possible an no bright sun.

To describe the great work of the Bechers maybe these words of Paul Klee would be right ones: "Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible".