Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf (Germany, 1954) was born in Munich and grew up in the United States. After studying at the universities of Berkeley and Essen, he worked as a photographer for the magazines time, Spiegel and Stern. He has meanwhile been living and working alternately in Paris and Hong Kong for many years as an author-photographer. Much of his recent work explores the cultural identity of that latter city. In 2010 Wolf turned his attention to Paris and produced the series Paris Street View. For this he used Internet images that deviated from the usual Paris clichés. In 2010 he also won a World Press Photo Award for his series Tokyo Subway Dreams.

A few years ago Wolf was commissioned to photograph the changing face of Chicago, a city long renowned for its architecture, but which for some time now has been subject to urban renewal. Wolf focussed his attention on the incessantly-changing urban landscape of the downtown area and on issues of voyeurism. In his earlier work, such as the series Architecture of Density, the focus was on the human aspects of urban architecture, but in Transparent City he goes a step further by literally zooming-in on the lives of the inhabitants of those buildings. Wolf discovered that everyday life is really rather boring and that many often spend it in solitude.