Hamburger Kunsthalle I by Candida Höfer

Facts

Material

C-print

Size

152 x 152 cm

Description

Candida Höfer's photographs do not normally feature people, but they always depict public or semi-public places in which people congregate, observe or control one another - libraries, zoos, waiting rooms, lobbies, university lecture rooms, archives, canteens, dressing rooms or, as in this case, the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Höfer probes the way power is manifested in architectural arrangements. "I am looking for the similar in public spaces, though what attracts me is the difference between these similarities." The absence of people, of any trace of the personal, allows Höfer to foreground the mechanisms by which each institution within the body politic arranges its spaces to assert and consolidate its control over the individual.