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Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf

Country: Germany/United States
Birth: 1954 | Death: 2019

The focus of the German photographer Michael Wolf’s work is life in megacities. many of his projects document the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe, and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang School with Otto Steinert in Essen, Germany.

He moved to Hong Kong in 1994 where he worked for 8 years as a contract photographer for Stern Magazine.

Since 2001, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, many of which have been published as books. Wolf’s work has been exhibited in numerous locations, including the Venice Bienniale for Architecture, Aperture Gallery, New York; Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tempere, Finland, the Museum for Work in Hamburg, Germany, Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

His work is held in many permanent collections, including the metropolitan museum of art in New York the Brooklyn Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany and the German Museum for Architecture, Frankfurt, Germany. He has won first prize in the World Press Photo Award competition on two occasions (2005 & 2010) and an honorable mention (2011) In 2010, Wolf was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet photography prize.

He has published more than 13 photo books including Bottrop Ebel 1976 (Peperoni Press, 2012), Tokyo Compression Three (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2012), Architecture of Density (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2012), Hong Kong Corner Houses (Hong Kong University Press, 2011), Portraits (Superlabo, Japan, 2011), Tokyo Compression Revisited (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2011), Real Fake Art (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2011), FY (Peperoni Press, 2010), A Series of Unfortunate Events (Peperoni Press, 2010), Tokyo Compression (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2010), Hong Kong Inside-Outside (Peperoni Press / Asia One, 2009), The Transparent City (Aperture, 2008) and Sitting in China (Steidl, 2002).

Source: photomichaelwolf.com


Michael Wolf’s work examines life in the layered urban landscape, addressing juxtapositions of public and private space, anonymity and individuality, history, and modern development. In a diverse array of photographic projects, from street views appropriated from Google Earth, to portraits capturing the crush of the Tokyo Subway, and dizzying architectural landscapes, Wolf explores the density of city life.

Wolf currently lives and works in Hong Kong and Paris. His photographs are in the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; The Brooklyn Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago among others, and have been exhibited at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (2011), Goethe Institute in Hong Kong (2010), Fotographie Museum, Amsterdam (2010), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2008), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2008), and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2008), among others.

Wolf was awarded First Place in the 2010 World Press Photo Award contest in the Daily Life category, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Prix Pictet. Wolf's numerous monographs include Tokyo Compression Revisited (Peperoni Books, 2011), Real Fake Art (Peperoni Books, 2011), Tokyo Compression (Peperoni Books, 2010), Hong Kong: Inside/Outside (Peperoni Books, 2009), The Transparent City (Aperture and MoCP, 2008), Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door, (Thames & Hudson, 2005), and Sitting in China (Steidl, 2002).

Source: Robert Koch Gallery


Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany. He grew up in the United States, Europe, and Canada, and studied at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany. In 1994, Wolf moved to Hong Kong and worked for eight years as a contract photographer for Stern magazine, until he left to pursue his own projects. Wolf's photographic work in Asia focuses on the city and its architectural structures and follows on from his interest in people and human interaction. He has published seven photobooks to date. Wolf's work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and art fairs throughout the world since 2005 and is held in permanent collections across the US and Germany. Wolf has won previously won a World Press Photo award, the first prize in Contemporary Issues stories in 2005.

Source: World Press Photo

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Sam Heydt
United States
1986
Sam Heydt (born April 20, 1986) is an American social practice and recycled media artist born/raised in New York City. She has lived/worked in Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Reykjavík, Udaipur and Vienna [current]. As a published author, producer and lifelong social activist and environmentalist, Heydt has undertaken a range of altruistic, non­-profit work and anchors her practice in advocacy. Through her unique manner of expression, she illustrates a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Esteemed as one of the pioneers of the recycled media movement, she works across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text and employs a range of materials, often reinventing and trespassing their associative use. Marrying images of destruction with portrayals of the American Dream, her work confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for. Heydt's work has been shown in galleries, museums, art fairs and film festivals worldwide. Statement The edge is closer than we think, but illusion won't free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality. As the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, public discourse is being defined by even narrower bandwidths Our time is marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds. The skeletons of old factories serve as caveats for a world exploited beyond use, a world increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Dissidence is drowned out by the white noise of the media, which holds the social psyche captive in with the empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. Working across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it. Conflating time and place, her layered imagery collides, merges and disrupts logical relationships between occurrences. Through adding and subtracting meaning by combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.
Roger Fenton
United Kingdom
1819 | † 1869
Roger Fenton was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers. He was born into a Lancashire merchant family. After graduating from London with an Arts degree, Fenton became interested in painting and later developed a keen interest in the new technology of photography after seeing early examples at The Great Exhibition in 1851. Within a year, he began exhibiting his own photographs. He became a leading British photographer and instrumental in founding the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society). It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons – among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War – urged Roger Fenton to go to the Crimea to record the happenings. The London print publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons became his commercial sponsor. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war among the British people, and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of The Times; the photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News. He set off aboard HMS Hecla in February, landed at Balaklava on 8 March and remained there until 22 June. Fenton took Marcus Sparling as his photographic assistant, a servant known as William and a large horse-drawn van of equipment. Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment, Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs. Because the photographic material of his time needed long exposures, he was only able to produce pictures of stationary objects, mostly posed pictures; he avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers. But he also photographed the landscape, including an area near to where the Charge of the Light Brigade – made famous in Tennyson's poem – took place. In letters home soldiers had called the original valley "The Valley of Death", and Tennyson's poem used the same phrase, so when in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show, as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he took the troops'—and Tennyson's—epithet, expanded it as The Valley of the Shadow of Death with its deliberate evocation of Psalm 23, and assigned it to the piece; it is not the location of the famous charge, which took place in a long, broad valley several miles to the south-east. Despite summer high temperatures, breaking several ribs in a fall, suffering from cholera and also becoming depressed at the carnage he witnessed at Sevastopol, in all Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London and at various places across the nation in the months that followed. Fenton also showed them to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and also to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. Nevertheless, sales were not as good as expected. Despite the lack of commercial success for his Crimean photographs, Fenton later travelled widely over Britain to record landscapes and still life images. However, as time moved on, photography became more accessible to the general public. Many people sought to profit from selling quick portraits to common people. It is likely that Fenton, from a wealthy background, disdained 'trade' photographers, but nevertheless still wanted to profit from the art by taking exclusive images and selling them at good prices. He thus fell into conflict with many of his peers who genuinely needed to make money from photography and were willing to 'cheapen their art' (as Fenton saw it), and also with the Photographic Society, who believed that no photographer should soil himself with the 'sin' of exploiting his talent commercially in any manner. Amongst Fenton's photographs from this period are the City of Westminster, including The Palace of Westminster nearing completion in 1857 – almost certainly the earliest images of the building, and the only photographs showing the incomplete Clock Tower. In 1858 Fenton made studio genre studies based on romantically imaginative ideas of Muslim life, such as Seated Odalisque, using friends and models who were not always convincing in their roles. Although well known for his Crimean War photography, his photographic career lasted little more than a decade, and in 1862 he abandoned the profession entirely, selling his equipment and returned to the law as a barrister. Although becoming almost forgotten by the time of his death seven years later he was later formally recognized by art historians for his pioneering work and artistic endeavour. In 1862 the organizing committee for the International Exhibition in London announced its plans to place photography, not with the other fine arts as had been done in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition only five years earlier, but in the section reserved for machinery, tools and instruments – photography was considered a craft, for tradesmen. For Fenton and many of his colleagues, this was conclusive proof of photography's diminished status, and the pioneers drifted away. He died 8 August 1869 at his home in Potters Bar, Middlesex after a week-long illness – he was 50 years old. His wife died in 1886. Their graves were destroyed in 1969 when the Potters Bar church where they were buried was deconsecrated and demolished.Source: Wikipedia Roger Fenton is a towering figure in the history of photography, the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the medium’s “golden age” of the 1850s. Before taking up the camera, he studied law in London and painting in Paris. He traveled to Russia in 1852 and photographed the landmarks of Kiev and Moscow; founded the Photographic Society (later designated the Royal Photographic Society) in 1853; was appointed the first official photographer of the British Museum in 1854; achieved widespread recognition for his photographs of the Crimean War in 1855; and excelled throughout the decade as a photographer in all the medium’s genres—architecture, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant. Fenton’s most widespread acclaim came in 1855, with photographs of the Crimean War, a conflict in which British, French, Sardinian, and Turkish troops battled Russia’s attempt to expand its influence into European territory of the Ottoman empire. Fenton was commissioned by the Manchester publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons to travel to the Crimea and document the war, and his mission was encouraged by the government, which hoped that his photographs would reassure a worried public. Fenton’s extensive documentation of the war—the first such use of photography—included pictures of the port of Balaklava, the camps, the terrain of battle, and portraits of officers, soldiers, and support staff of the various allied armies. Perhaps inspired by the experience of traveling through Constantinople en route to Balaklava, or perhaps simply sharing the mid-nineteenth-century vogue for all things exotic, Fenton produced a theatrical suite of Orientalist compositions during the summer of 1858—costume pieces that strove for high art rather than documentation and that were, in a sense, an antidote to the harsh realities he had recorded in the Crimea. They owed as much to the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres as to Fenton’s own experience in the East. In 1862, after a final series of photographs—a remarkable group of lush still lifes—Fenton sold his equipment and negatives, resigned from the Royal Photographic Society, and returned to the bar. In the course of a single decade, Fenton had played a pivotal role—by advocacy and example—in demonstrating that photography could rival drawing and painting not only as a means of conveying information, but also as a medium of visual delight and powerful expression.Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Geir Tonnessen
Norway
1976
Geir Tønnessen (born in 1976) is a contemporary photographer currently based in Oslo, Norway. He studied photography by himself with some guidance from friends and the Internet. Some of his works have been exhibited in the following galleries: Cyan Studio (Oslo, Norway), Galleri MAP (Oslo, Norway), and Preus Museum (Horten, Norway). "Photography is to have fun and being smart at the same time, which for me is the perfect combination. With my creative fun shots I want to get other people to laugh and inspire them to shoot for them self. With my nature and city shots I want to create a special feeling that makes my viewers think and make them look at my shots for a long quiet time." Interview with Geir Tønnessen All About Photo: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer? Geir Tønnessen: When i very young realized i had to release my creative urges, and since i am a shitty drawer/painter, photo was my thing! And since i also like to be playful and humorous every day, i had to get it out some way! AAP: Where did you study photography? GT: I studied photography all by myself, spending many hour every day on the net looking at others pictures, by having a father reading art books to me since i was born, by going to a lot go art exhibitions home i Oslo and when visiting other countries and cities all over the world. AAP: How long have you been a photographer? GT: I got my camera when i was about five years old to my birthday from my grandmother. Something i enjoyed very much that time! AAP: What or who inspires you? GT: Other artists that with a lot of creativity and great new ideas. I love to find shoots by others that look like something i never have seen before. AAP: How could you describe your style? GT: My style is not easy to describe but i like to take creative artsy portraits, calm pictures of nature and early morning shots of cities. AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film? GT: I shoot both digital and analog. When i shoot analog, i use my Hasselblad 500cm with the standard 85mm Carl Zeiss and my Pratica LTL with a 50mm. When i shoot digital i use my Nikon d800 with Nikon NIKKOR 85mm 1:1.4G lens. AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? GT: I don`t use much time to edit on my computer, i like that my shots can be taken directly from the camera. So i general i just edit the shots just a little bit. AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)? GT: My favotite is Martin Parr. AAP: What mistake should a young photographer avoid? GT: Don`t think to much of technique! Just shoot and try to be creative and original! AAP: If you could have taken the photographs of someone else who would it be? GT: Martin Parr AAP: Anything else you would like to share? GT: Shoot first and ask for permission afterwards.
Hyun De Grande
South Korea/Belgium
1987
My name is Hyun De Grande. I was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1987 and I was adopted to Belgium when I was around 4 months old. I grew up in a small town called Oostkamp together with my parents and my brother, who is also adopted. At the age of 15, I started studying film and photography at the Art Academy in Bruges, which was my introduction to both artforms. After two more years of studying film at the School of Arts in Ghent, I moved to Brussels in 2008 to specialize in cinematography at the RITCS. I'm still residing in Brussels, and I currently work as a cinematographer in the narrative and commercial fields. Street photography is a passion to which I love devoting my energy to in between jobs. It's obvious that my cinematography background has heavily influenced my photography style, yet I try to approach things in a different way when I'm taking pictures compared to shooting a movie. It's mainly much more personal because I don't share the creative process with other people, which allows me to explore themes that are closer to myself as a person. Statement As a photographer I'm very fascinated by the feelings of loneliness, isolation and/or alienation because they strongly resonate with me personally. Perhaps it can be back-tracked to my adoption, which has created a sense of never really feeling at home anywhere I go, and therefore these emotions have always been a big part of my life. Esthetically, I'm mainly looking for clear shapes and lines as an arena for my subjects, both coming from light and/or architecture. I feel that the solidity of these shapes enhances the fragility of the people portrayed within these lines. Trapped or lost in a cold and unforgiving environment. I also love working in a wider frame as it allows me to use that extra horizontal space to evoke emptiness. I find it interesting to utilize the surroundings of my characters to create emotional context, even when these surroundings are blank or abstract. I use a 2:1 ratio on all of my photographs, which stems from my cinematography background.
Bunny Yeager
United States
1929 | † 2014
Linnea Eleanor "Bunny" Yeager was an American photographer and pin-up model. She was born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, to Raymond Conrad and Linnea (née Sherlin) Yeager on March 13, 1929. Her family moved to Florida when she was 17. She adopted the nickname "Bunny" from Lana Turner's character Bunny Smith in the 1945 movie Week-End at the Waldorf. The nickname has also been attributed to her portrayal of the Easter Bunny in a high school play. Bunny Yeager graduated from Miami Edison High School and afterward enrolled at the Coronet Modeling School and Agency. She won numerous local beauty pageants including in rapid succession Queen of Miami, Florida Orchid Queen, Miss Trailercoach of Dade County, Miss Army & Air Force, Miss Personality of Miami Beach, Queen of the Sports Carnival and Cheesecake Queen of 1951. Yeager became one of the most photographed models in Miami. Photos of Yeager appeared in over 300 newspapers and magazines. She also designed and sewed many of the outfits she and her models wore, at one time boasting that she never wore the same outfit twice while modeling. She designed and produced hundreds of bikinis when the two-piece swimsuit was a new fashion item and is credited with its popularity in America. Bruno Banani, the German fashion company, has developed a line of swimwear based on Yeager's designs from the 1950s. Yeager entered photography to save money by copying her modeling photographs, enrolling in a night class at a vocational school in 1953. Her career as a professional photographer began when a picture of Maria Stinger, taken for her first school assignment, was sold to Eye magazine for the cover of the March 1954 issue. She became a technically skilled photographer noted for, among other things, her early use of the fill flash technique to lighten dark shadows when shooting in bright sun. Yeager was one of the first photographers to photograph her models outdoors with natural light. Matt Schudel wrote in the Washington Post that her images were vivid and dynamic, going on to say, "She favored active poses and a direct gaze at the camera lens, in what could be interpreted alternately as playful innocence or pure lust." She met Bettie Page in 1954, and took most of the photographs of her that year. During their brief collaboration, she took over 1,000 pictures of Page. Along with photographer Irving Klaw, Yeager played a role in helping to make Page famous, particularly with her photos in Playboy magazine. American Photo magazine described Yeager's work with Page as "a body of imagery that remains some of the most memorable — and endearing — erotica on record" in a 1993 article. The most famous images of Page by Yeager include the January 1955 Playboy centerfold in which she kneels wearing only a Santa hat while hanging a silver ornament on a Christmas tree and a series of photographs with a pair of live cheetahs. Yeager was a very prolific and successful pinup photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, so much so, that her work was described as ubiquitous in that era. She continued to work extensively with Playboy shooting eight centerfolds in addition to covers and pictorial spreads. She discovered Lisa Winters, the first Playmate of the Year. Yeager also appeared in the magazine as a model five times. One appearance with the headline, "Queen of the Playboy Centerfolds", was photographed by Hugh Hefner. Her work was also published in mainstream magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Pageant, Redbook and Women's Wear Daily. The famous still images she took of Ursula Andress emerging from the water on the beach in Jamaica for the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No are probably her best-known bikini photographs. She discovered many notable models. In the 1970s as men's magazines became more anatomically graphic Yeager largely stopped photographing for them, saying they were somewhat "smutty" and that, "They had girls showing more than they should." In 1998 she stated, "The kind of photographs they wanted was something I wasn't prepared to do." An exhibition titled Beach Babes Bash in the early 1990s at the Center for Visual Communication (at that time located in Coral Gables, Florida) featured photographs by Yeager of models from Miami on the beach from the 1950s. Another exhibit at the same gallery featuring Yeager's work was titled Sex Sirens of the Sixties. In 1992 Playboy published a retrospective of her work titled The Bettie Boom. Since 2002, Yeager's work has been exhibited in contemporary art galleries. In early 2010, The Andy Warhol Museum held the first major museum exhibition of Yeager's work. The exhibit, The Legendary Queen of the Pin Up, featured her self-portraits, some from her book How I Photograph Myself published by A.S. Barnes & Co. in 1964. The Fabulous Bunny Yeager an exhibit in 2011 at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami also featuring self-portraits by Yeager was of photographs that had not been exhibited previously. Also in 2011 Helmut Schuster curated an exhibition for Art Basel at the Dezer Schauhalle in Miami titled Bunny Yeager: Retrospective to the Future featuring over 200 of Yeager's photos. Included were some images that had not been shown before of models including Bettie Page. In 2012 Bunny Yeager had two exhibitions in Germany, Funland at Gallery Schuster Potsdam and Femme Fatale in December 2012 at Gallery Schuster Berlin. The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale held a 2013 exhibit, Bunny Yeager: Both Sides of the Camera featuring her photographs of herself, Page, and model Paz de la Huerta. The exhibit also included some of Yeager's first new pictures in twenty years. Yeager had a show at the Sofia Vault in Sofia, Bulgaria in October 2013. The Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida put on an exhibit, Bunny Yeager: Selections from How I Photograph Myself in 2014. The Sin City Gallery in Las Vegas held a posthumous exhibit, Bunny's Bombshells, from June 5 to July 20 2014. She had her own studio in the Wynwood Art District of Miami, part of the Center for Visual Communication. There is a "Bunny Yeager Lounge" in Berlin which is open to the public and shows photos, memorabilia and movies. Yeager was also founding editor and publisher of a trade magazine for entertainment professionals, Florida Stage & Screen. As of 1998 her 24 books had sold over 1 million copies. Bunny Yeager was married twice, first to Arthur Irwin who died in 1977 and then to Harry Schaefer who died in 2000.[5] She had two daughters, Lisa and Cherilu. Yeager died on May 25, 2014 of congestive heart failure at age 85 in North Miami, Florida.Source: Wikipedia
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