Candida Höfer

(German, born 1944)

Candida Höfer is a German photographer best known for her large-scale color images of empty interiors. The artist focuses primarily on cultural and institutional spaces, including libraries, zoos, and opera houses. These spaces, often absent of or scarcely populated by human figures—as seen in her photobook Architecture of Absence (2004)—give each image an eerie monumentality. “Spaces may or may not invite the image—if they do, they mostly do it with their spatial layers of time,” she said of her work. “It is then the image that takes the place of the space; the image in its own right.” Born in Eberswalde, Germany in 1944, Höfer studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Thomas Struth and Axel Hütte. The Becher’s approach to photography as a conceptual tool in producing an archive of places, had a profound effect on Höfer and her peers. The artist currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Her works are held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.