Michael WOLF (1954 – 2019, Germany)
Paris Street View #9, 2009
C-Print
Sheet 177.8 x 228.6 cm (70 x 90 in.)
Edition of 3 plus 1 AP; Ed. no. 1/3
Print only
– Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany. He worked and lived in Paris and Hong Kong where he died in April 2019. The focus of Michael Wolf’s work is life in mega-cities. His projects document both the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Born in Munich, 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 eight years as a contract photographer for Stern magazine. Since 2003, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, publishing over thirty books of his work.
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 in California, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and M+ in Hong Kong.
– Street View
‘Paris street view’ deals with the cultural identity of Paris. with the aid of Google Street View technology, Wolf investigated the concept of representation and symbolism. By using pixelated images from the internet, he broke through Paris’ nearly universally recognizable photographic iconography and suggested a new way of reading the city. Two people embracing on a busy Paris street, for instance, are a playful reference to Robert Doisneau’s ubiquitous ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville‘ from 1950. But cropping out parts of images on Google Street View, ‘photos of photos’ are created that shed a new light on a city in which nearly everything has already been photographed.
– Michael Wolf, Art, City, Street Photography, Colour Photography, Human, Google, Street View, Kiss, Monitoring, Paris, France, Technology