THE HAGUE.- A figure behind a misted window turns its face away and closes its eyes in an attempt to evade the lens of the photographer. The metro passenger is crushed between fellow-commuters and unable to move when photographer Michael Wolf points his camera at him from the other side of the glass. Over the 2010-2013 period, Wolf returned time and time again to the same metro platform in Tokyo to lie in wait for his passing prey. The result is Tokyo Compression, perhaps Wolf’s most renowned photo-series, in which he explores the subjects of privacy and voyeurism in great detail. In the densely populated world cities where Michael Wolf works, these themes are unavoidable. The Hague Museum of Photography is exhibiting a major retrospective of Wolf’s work, stretching from his earliest years as a documentary photographer right through to relatively recent series like Architecture of Density (2003 – 2014) and Transparent City (2006).

Photojournalist in Germany
Michael Wolf was born in Munich in 1954. He grew up in the United States and Canada but returned to Germany for his further education. There, he was taught between 1972 and 1976 by Otto Steinert, the legendary professor at the Folkwang School in Essen. Wolf began his professional career as a photojournalist, working for renowned magazines like Geo and Stern. In 2003 he changed metier, becoming an autonomous visual artist. Nevertheless, his work remains rooted in the tradition of socially engaged documentary photography. Its core theme is the lives of people living in the great, ever-changing metropolises of today’s world.

Life in Hong Kong
Since 1994, Michael Wolf has lived and worked in Hong Kong. The city with its over seven million residents has become his main source of inspiration. In his 100 x 100 series (2006) he portrays a hundred residents of a housing complex where the tiny homes measure just nine square metres. Hong Kong Corner Houses (2005-2011) is a series of photographs of the city’s most eye-catching – often illegally modified and enlarged – corner properties. Generally erected in the 1950s and ’60s, these buildings are an endangered species: they are rapidly being replaced by new structures in an attempt to keep up with the meteoric development of the city. In Architecture of Density (2003-2014), one of Wolf’s most celebrated series, photographs of the densely built city are framed in such a way as to exclude any glimpse of the sky or horizon. Consequently, the images seem almost abstract. Informal Solutions (2003-present) showcases the ad-hoc solutions to day-to-day problems that Wolf so often encounters in the alleyways of the city: temporary structures that make unexpected use of everyday household objects.

Voyeurism and privacy
In Transparent City (2006), Michael Wolf plays with the same themes of voyeurism and privacy that he would later address in Tokyo Compression. Arriving in Chicago, he was struck by the transparency of the city’s architecture and became fascinated by what took place inside the buildings rather than outside. His interest prompted the series Transparent City Details (2006). To create it, Wolf pored over every centimetre of the pictures he had shot, in search of peculiar behaviour by individuals in rooms so high up that they thought nobody could see them. He blows up details until we can make out the heavily pixelated image of a businessman knocking a golf ball around in his office or somebody despairingly burying his face in his hands. Taken in the early days of the worldwide financial crisis, the pictures show the monumental scale of the slick and sophisticated buildings in contrast to the human fragility of their users.

Just as Michael Wolf zooms in on his own photographs in Transparent City, so Google Street View allows us to spy on the city. Inspired by this new phenomenon (launched on the Internet in 2007), Wolf began work on a project of the same name in 2008, when he was living temporarily in Paris. Using Google Street View (then much less heavily censored) to familiarize himself with the city, he came across scenes like an elderly woman who had fallen down on the pavement, a fight, a man peeing in public, and many people raising a finger at the Google camera. By taking photographs of these Internet images, Wolf explored new directions and developed an alternative form of street photography.

The Real Toy Story
Wolf’s impressive, wall-sized installation entitled The Real Toy Story (2004-2018) is a commentary on industrial mass production in China. A vast mass of ‘Made in China’ toys (around 20,000 in all, covering 40 square metres of wall) flanks the photographs he took of workers in Chinese toy factories. The shy and sometimes resigned faces of the individual workers stand in sharp contrast to the overwhelming mass of cheap toys.

Première in Arles
The exhibition is a production by the Hague Museum of Photography and was premiered last summer during the major Rencontres de La Photographie photo-festival in Arles. It is accompanied by a catalogue entitled Michael Wolf Works, authored by Marc Feustel, Jan-Philipp Sendker and Wim van Sinderen (Peperoni Books, price € 50).