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| Candida Höfer Hermitage, Saint Petersburg 2014 |
Dialogues below are excerpted from a 2010 interview published in Museo Magazine. Carolyn Yerkes questioned German photographer Candida Höfer (born 1944) –
Carolyn Yerkes: Why always interiors?
Candida Höfer: I am not good at landscapes.
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| Candida Höfer Villa Borghese, Rome 2012 |
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| Candida Höfer Villa Borghese, Rome 2012 |
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| Candida Höfer Villa Borghese, Rome 2012 |
Carolyn Yerkes: Your exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in New York this spring consisted of large-format photographs of libraries and galleries in Florence and Naples. While this subject is not new for you, it seems that you are progressively increasing the scale of your photographs with each series. Some of the prints in this recent show were over six feet wide. What are some of the motivations for this larger format?
Candida Höfer: I am not sure if the sizes are increasing from project to project, but I am indeed working with large formats over the last years. For this approach with which I have experimented for quite a while, several developments have come together. In my view, these rooms share a character – as different as they may be among themselves – which invites a slow and careful reading of details distributed over space in shades of light. Also, the technology of making photographs has very much improved over the last years, allowing for an approach that would not have been possible before. I can finally invite people to fully expose themselves to the temptations of a three-dimensional perception of what is but a printed image.
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| Candida Höfer Villa Borghese, Rome 2012 |
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| Candida Höfer Villa Borghese, Rome 2012 |
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| Candida Höfer Palazzo Te, Mantua 2010 |
Carolyn Yerkes: Michael Fried recently made your work a focus of his 2008 book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. In this book, he argues that contemporary photography engages viewers in ways that previously only painting could, in part because photographs now can be produced at such a large scale and mounted on the wall. If you are familiar with his critique, and with his citation of your work within that critique, do you feel that he accurately captured your project and its goals?
Candida Höfer: I believe in a sort of separation of labor (or even power) in art. I just do the images. Others do the interpretations.
Carolyn Yerkes: More generally, when your work becomes incorporated into a critic's theoretical project in this way, does that kind of criticism, in turn, affect your work in any way?
Candida Höfer: Not consciously.
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| Candida Höfer Tribuna, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 2008 |
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| Candida Höfer Musée du Louvre 2005 |
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| Candida Höfer Teatro comunale di Carpi 2011 |
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| Candida Höfer Neues Museum, Berlin 2009 |
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| Candida Höfer Neues Museum, Berlin 2009 |
In Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Michael Fried suggests that, "a fundamental point of reference for Höfer's photographs of interiors, whether or not she is aware of it, is the modernist gallery space, which her pictures at once allude to and critique in several highly specific respects."
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| Candida Höfer solo show Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich 2010 |
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| Candida Höfer solo show Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich 2010 |