About Candida Höfer
Candida Höfer (born 1944 in Eberswalde, Germany) has spent five decades photographing the interiors of museums, libraries, opera houses, and archives, working consistently in the absence of people to isolate how institutional space organizes attention and authority.
She studied first at the Kölner Werkschule before entering the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973, initially in Ole John's film class. When Bernd Becher joined the faculty, she became one of his first students, graduating as a Meisterschülerin in 1982 alongside classmates Thomas Struth and Axel Hütte.
Working in large-format color — originally C-prints, later digital pigment prints — Höfer photographs each interior straight-on and symmetrically, letting shelving, seating, and architectural ornament carry the composition on their own terms. She has described the absence of people as a way of sharpening what a space does to those who use it: "It became apparent to me that what people do in these spaces — and what these spaces do to them — is clearer when no one is present, just as an absent guest is often the subject of a conversation."
Her photographs are held in the collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, and in 2018 she received the Sony World Photography Awards' Outstanding Contribution to Photography award. She continues to live and work in Cologne.
