Tokyo Compression By Michael Wolf

In his best known series on Hong Kong’s highly compressed, often brutal architecture, Architecture of Density, Wolf uses the city’s sky-scraping tower blocks to great effect, eliminating the sky and horizon line to flatten each image and turn these façades into seemingly never-ending abstractions. Beyond the stark beauty of these compositions, Wolf’s studies of the thick concrete skin of the city make us wonder about the thousands of lives contained within each frame. Although Hong Kong is all but deserted in these images, minute signs of life creep to its surface… a shirt hanging out to dry or a silhouette behind a blind. Despite the stifling compression of this architecture, Wolf’s compositions are laced with evidence of people’s ability and need to express their individuality within these formal structures.
The formalism and deadpan approach of Architecture of Density echoes the work that emerged from the Düsseldorf school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like the work of Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, Wolf’s photographs reveal a desire to document and connect with the world around him, but with a contemporary visual approach. Contrary to the lyrical drama of ‘classic’ documentary photography, these images are coolly detached from their subject and the photographer’s presence behind the camera is barely perceptible.
This work on the architecture of Hong Kong can also be linked to the new photographic approaches that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The landmark 1975 exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a man-altered landscape, brought together a group of photographers who, in the sprawling post-industrial landscapes of the new American West, found a mirror for the transformation of the structure of American society. In the same way, Wolf found his inspiration in Hong Kong and China, places where ever-shifting cityscapes provided him with constant stimulation and the opportunity to document the many faces of this emerging superpower.
However, contrary to many of the New Topographics photographers, Wolf is not a ‘pure’ photographer of landscape, as is evident from the diverse work that he has produced in China. He lays out his multi-layered approach in his books Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door and Hong Kong Inside Outside. In the Hong Kong Back Door series, he carves out fragments from the city streets: from workers’ gloves drying on a spiral of barbed wire to the chaotic labyrinths formed by plumbing and ventilation pipes. By focusing on these seemingly insignificant details, Wolf succeeds in capturing the beauty of the vernacular while simultaneously illustrating China’s concern with functionality over form. Although people are almost entirely absent from the series, the barely perceptible traces of their existence present in Architecture of Density take center stage here. In one image, a single red rubber glove placed on top of a metal pole lays claim to this territory like a flag planted in the ground: a symbol of the space being reclaimed by the city’s inhabitants. With images like this one, Wolf sheds light on the seams of the city, the zones where the lack of private space forces the city’s inhabitants to reclaim public space to fit their basic needs.