Candida Höfer (1944, Eberswalde, Germany) has been photographing both public and semi-public spaces in a style defined by an anachronistic approach since 1989. After studying at the Kölner Werkschule between 1964 and 1968, Candida Höfer attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (Germany), initially reading film with Ole John (1973-1976) and then photography with Bernd Becher (1976 -1982). Following in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School of photography, Candida Höfer has often captured images of waiting rooms, spa resorts, banks, churches, libraries, theaters, and museums. These transitional spaces are also places where universal culture is accumulated, organized, and conserved to an encyclopedic degree, and are photographed by the artist with a rigor and simplicity approaching minimalism. Immediately recognizable, Candida Höfer’s photographs crystallize the peculiar inherent in places where often an illustrious history clashes with their present-day use. As in Spiegelkantine at Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, the lighting for these neutral shots comes solely from the natural light of the location. Spaces normally packed with visitors are shown devoid of human presence: all that remains are the outlines of these architectural products of culture or industry.

Candida Höfer

In majestic large-format color photography, Candida Höfer captures the psychological residue left behind in empty public and institutional spaces.

Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos Lisboa is part of a project called In Portugal, which the artist realized between 2005 and 2006. The series consist of a selection of photographs taken in public sites throughout the Iberian country. Typical of Candida Höfer, the artist has photographed empty interiors of libraries, museums, palaces and theaters, focusing on the cultural spaces free from human presence.

The self-imposed subject restrictions evident in her project are both cultural and formal in nature. The Baroque, modern and contemporary interiors Höfer captures through her lens provide “formal portrait of the social itself,” as it has been defined in Europe since the Enlightenment.

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“ Spaces may or may not invite the image—if they do, they mostly do it with their spatial layers of time… It is then the image that takes the place of the space; the image in its own right. „

—Candida Höfer