Farewell to Michael Wolf, photographer of urban densities and astral lightness

On 24 April, at the age of 64, Michael Wolf left our world, that very same complicated world he has been representing for many years in his stunning and complex images. He departed from Cheung Chau, in the so called District of Islands, south of Hong Kong where he had moved in 2004 as photo reporter for Stern magazine.  And is singular indeed that the place where he had been living in the last two years, is one of the tiniest and less populated among the 236 islands of the archipelago: a very philsophical life choice, for an artist who has always read the world through the interpretation of its housing density (or else a very poetic way to be at the same time faraway and so close to his own obsession). If his little guides to the most unusual uses of Hong Kong’s back alleys is a sort of loving and amused diary, is in fact with “Architecture of Density” that Wolf, who had already won the World Press Photo twice in 2005 and 2010, gained international recognition, bringing him to the nomination for the prestigious Prix Pictet, again in 2010 (on the theme of growt). The colourful, gigantic and iper–detailed images of façades he has been taken for more than ten years in Hong Kong have been, and still are, a touchstone not just for architecture photography but for photographic art more generally, not to tell of the one, more sociologic and anthropologic, which distinghuished every noteworthy creative act.

But if the award for the most iconic images goes to the ones of “Tokyo Compression”, where the Japanese salarymen are forced into the physical borders of the frame and in the conceptual ones of photography itself, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (published by Peperoni Books as well as all the other seventeen books of the latest ten years) has to be certainly credited as the visual survey that, as usual with humor and committed lightness, first set the use of Google Street View in the artistic mainstream. And it’s from the very shore of his tiny island that every morning, in the past two years, Michael Wolf has been portrayed the sunrises on the Hong Kong archipelago collected in his last work, “Cheng Chau Sunrises” (Buchkunst Berlin, 2019), a hymn to nature, a homage to painting, a concession to freedom and above all a reflexion on impermanence where Wolf, in an aware and by now sadly insightful contrast to the rest of his series, just for once shun every sight of city’s intricated and futile concoctions.