In The Life Of Cities

What is it that gives places their individual qualities and defines the life of a city? Architects and urbanists are accustomed to describing and creating the organizational structures, the layouts and physical attributes of our cities. But what are the relations between the design of a city—its form—and the life engendered by that form? Responding to this question is the inspiration for In the Life of Cities. Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today.

376 pages, 286 illustrations
16.5 x 24 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Lars Müller Publishers, in coopertation with Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Year of Publication: 2012
Prize: CHF 60.00

Architecture Of Density

128 pages
31 x 24 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Year of publication: 2012





Bottrop Ebel 76

144 pages
87 Tritone und 15 color illustrations
30 x 24 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Year of publication: 2012

CHF 50






Tokyo Compression 3

112 pages
81 color illustrations
20 x 25 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Year of publication: 2012



 
 

Real Fake Art

Strange, this is how these pictures appear at first sight. In front of typical Chinese urban backdrops young Chinese men and women present oil paintings by American and European artists from different epochs. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, even photographs by Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Bernd and Hilla Becher or August Sander can be found among the works. What stands behind all this?

In fact we see pictures of a multi-million dollar industry – the production of copies of popular artworks, which are sold at giveaway prices into the whole world. Van Gogh: $ 75, Andy Warhol: $ 45, Ed Ruscha $ 50. The handpainted copies mainly come from China, the buyers can almost entirely be found in the United States and Europe, the countries of origin of the unaffordable originals.

122 pages
51 color illustrations
25 x 32 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Date of publication: 2011

CHF 70.00

Portraits

I'm glad and not surprised to see I'm the only person using Google Street View as an artistic source.

  
  
  
FY

Michael Wolf’s Street View-pictures deal with the automatically produced flood of images, which is spread by Google via the internet. For FY, similar to “A Series Of Unfortunate Events“, Michael Wolf uses the picture pool of the Google tool as basic material for his own pictures again. During researches he encountered a global mass phenomenon.

You can think about Google Street View whatever you like, there is certainly one good thing about it, because obviously Street View inspires young and old people from all classes of population to spontaneous finger exercises. The gymnastic figures are presented in very different ways. Young men with base caps and adidas-outfits work smoothly from the wrist, drivers and cyclists show their skills casually en passant, business people with tie and collar mostly approach the matter highly concentrated and with stretched arms deserve high scores on technical merits, the working class milieu prefers the upward-sweep-version with a half sideward turn most of the time. Almost acrobatic are the recently widespread “Double Fuck You“-figures, which are carried out from the hollow back or with bodies bent forward.

FY provides an interesting collection of very creative, striking and bizarre versions of this explicit gesture.

72 pages
32 color illustrations
17 x 28 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Wanderer Books
Date of publication: 2011
Limited edition of 300 copies

CHF 40.00

 



A Series of Unfortunate Events

Michael Wolf is best known for his large-size architectural shots from Hong Kong and Chicago. Actually the series “Architecture of Density” and “The Transprant City” are part of a constantly growing oeuvre which deals with the conditions of the modern urban life under the title “Life in Cities”. With his recently published book “Tokyo Compression”, which shows depressing impressions from the subway system in Tokyo, the photographer raises the question: In how far may, should or must photographers deal with the public today?

A final answer to this question does not exist, but it is clear that the question in front of the background of an unleashed flood of images, which is spread over the internet, and the automated image production by surveillance cameras and Robot Cams has to be negotiated completely new. This is all the more after recently a new stage of re-measurement of the world has been started with “Google Street View”.

Michael Wolf takes up this topic in his work “Street View”, which has been started at the same time as “Tokyo Compression”, and reinterprets the genre of the street photography in a highly unconventional way by using the almost inexhaustible picture pool of the Google Tool as basic material for his own images. With the camera in front of the screen he gets “his” images out of the automatically generated, authorless Google screens. Extreme details and geographical fade-ins of the software, which usually should serve the orientation, induce photographs which have an irritating as well as alarming effect like the underground portraits from Tokyo.

72 pages
Ca. 50 color illustrations
15 x 20 cm
Hardcover
English
With texts by Steven Harris and Marc Feustel

CHF 40.00



 
  
Tokyo Compression Revisited

With "Tokyo Compression" Michael Wolf struck a nerve. His portraits of people who are on their way in the Tokyo subway, constrained between glass, steel and fellow travelers, have won many awards and were shown in exhibitions around the globe. The first edition of this book was sold out after a few weeks.

And the topic kept haunting Michael Wolf as well. He returned to Tokyo in order to immerse in the subsurface insanity once again and this time even deeper. Now with "Tokyo Compression Revisited" the second, completely revised edition of the classic is published, with many so far unreleased images and an entirely new "hidden track" at the end of the book.

Before Michael Wolf other artists have created subway series, among them famous names such as Bruce Davidson and Walker Evans, the concept as well as the metonymy of "Compression" however is new. Michael Wolf is not interested in seat cushions, graffiti, interior architecture or the traveler’s relation to that. He rather discovered the subway system as suitable place in order to investigate mental state and aggregate condition of the city people. Wolf leaves out all accessories, focuses just faces and figures. With his radical aesthetics he creates enormously intensive pictures that in a distressing, yes shocking manner directly aim into the portrayed people’s inner life.

With his accompanying essay TOKYO SUBWAY DREAMS Christian Schüle delivers a gloomy diagnosis to the mass loneliness in modern megacities.

112 pages
75 color illustrations
20 x 25 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Date of publication: 2011
English
With an essay by Christian Schüle

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Hong Kong Corner Houses

In Hong Kong Corner Houses, the internationally renowned German photographer Michael Wolf continues with his visual quest for the overlooked and underappreciated urban phenomena that give a city its special character. This time, he draws our attention to Hong Kong's urban corners and buildings that are often inconspicuous amid the high-rise, high-density urban clutter of Hong Kong.

These ordinary residential-commercial buildings of 1950s and 1960s vintage represent the expression of local Chinese pragmatism and expediency in the economic austerity of early postwar decades. The photographic presentation captures the inherent paradoxes of their architectural character: the quiet prominence, attractive banality, and tectonic chaos that give urban Hong Kong its endearing quality.

Complementing the superb photographs of Michael Wolf, Hong Kong Corner Houses features an essay and extended captions by two of Hong Kong's best-known academics in the field of architectural conservation, Drs. Lynne DiStefano and Lee Ho Yin.

144 pages
31 x 25 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Hong Kong University Press
Date of publication: 2011

CHF 50.00









Prix Pictet
Growth

The Prix Pictet, launched by the Swiss Private Bank Pictet & Cie, showcases photography that deals with the key issue of global sustainability. Now in its third cycle, the current Prix Pictet highlights the theme of growth. Although an engine for economic development, growth (in excess) can compromise human existence and endanger the planet. This controversial topic is explored in depth by the many artists who were nominated for the Prize and by the twelve talented artists who the expert independent jury shortlisted for the award. The results of unbridled growth and ceaseless development are portrayed to thought-provoking and aesthetic effect.

The twelve shorlist photographers are: Christian Als, Edward Burtynsky, Stéphane Couturier, Mitch Epstein, Chris Jordan, Yeondo Jung, Vera Lutter, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Taiyn Struch, Thomas Struth, Guy Tillim, and Michael Wolf.

128 pages
72 color, 11 b/w illustrations
25 x 32 cm
Hardcover with jacket
Published by: teNeues
Date of publication: 2010

CHF 80.00

Tokyo Compression

Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and primarily of Hong Kong, where he has been living for more than 15 years.

His latest pictures have also been created in a big city: Tokyo. But this time Tokyo’s architecture is not the topic. Michael Wolf’s “Tokyo Compression” focuses on the craziness of Tokyo’s underground system. For his shots he has chosen a location which relentlessly provides his camera with new pictures minute per minute.

Every day thousands and thousands of people enter this subsurface hell for two or more hours, constrained between glass, steel and other people who roll to their place of work and back home beneath the city. In Michael Wolf’s pictures we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way.

112 pages
75 color illustrations
20 x 25 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Peperoni Books
Date of publication: 2010
English
With an essay by Christian Schüle

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Hong Kong Inside Outside

For more than 14 years German photographer Michael Wolf has been living in Hong Kong. Focused on the specific visual elements he has depicted high density living in one of the world's most crowded cities like nobody has before. HONG KONG INSIDE OUTSIDE combines two major series of his work titled Architecture of Density and 100 x 100.

For Architecture of Density, Wolf fashioned a distinctive style of photography. He removes any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattens the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer's eye. Wolf photographs crumbling buildings in need of repair, brand new buildings under construction covered in bamboo scaffolding, as well as fully occupied residential complexes. Wolf's disorienting vantage point gives the viewer the feeling that the buildings extend indefinitely, which perhaps is the spatial experience of Hong Kong's inhabitants.

As a way to investigate the social ramifications of living in such dense conditions, with his series 100 x 100 Wolf juxtaposes the anonymity of the exterior residential complexes in Architecture of Density with interior portraits of 100 individuals and families surrounded by all their belongings living in public housing consisting of identical 100-square-foot apartments allocated to each family. He obtains the same vantage point for each picture forming a typology that allows the viewer to study how the individuals make the confined spaces their own.

Two books in a slipcase
352 pages
Hardbound
Co-published by: Asia One Books (Hong Kong) and Peperoni Books (Germany)
Publication date: 2009

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The Transparent City

This is Wolf's first body of work to address an American city. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City, his details are fragments of life—digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged—snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses: Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner. The material resonates with all the formalism of the constructed, architectonic work for which Wolf is well-known, but also emphasizes the conceptual underpinnings of his ongoing engagement with the idea of how modern life unfolds within the framework of the ever-growing contemporary city.

122 pages
Hardcover
34.3 cm x 27.4 cm
Pubished by: Aperture/MoCP
Publication date: 2008

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Pieces of China

Special Edition with its own slipcase and one unique c print 18 x 24 cm 
92 pages
Hardcover
23 x 29 cm
Published by: Tampere Museum
Publiation date: 2007

CHF 250.00









Hongkong

Special Edition with its own slipcase and two unique c prints 
120 pages
Hardcover
37 x 27.7 cm
Published by: Steidl Göttingen
Publiation date: 2006

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Hong Kong: Front Door / Back Door

This trip through one of the most densely populated areas of the world is also a journey through a strangely underpopulated place, inhabited only by the traces of city dwellers. The dark back alleys that crisscross the city are home to objects that, at first glance, seem to be discarded—the random detritus of the man-made world.

Under the scrutiny of Michael Wolf's photographic eye, these objects become fascinating installation pieces, while the abstract patterns of the buildings reveal the beauty and order that underlie the apparent chaos of the city. Thought-provoking texts by Kenneth Baker and Douglas Young explore the choices that people make of lifestyle, form, function, identity, and design, as well as the notion of Hong Kong as a brand.

120 pages
75 color illustrations
28 x 37 cm
Published by: Thames and Hudson
Publication date: 2005
Texts by: Kenneth Baker and Douglas Young

CHF 50.00

The special edition with own slipcase and 2 unique c prints is sold out.




Chinese Propaganda Posters

With his smooth, warm, red face, which radiated light in all directions, Chairman Mao Zedong was a fixture in Chinese propaganda posters produced between the birth of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the early 1980s.

These infamous posters were, in turn, central fixtures in Chinese homes, railway stations, schools, journals, magazines, and just about anywhere else where people were likely to see them.
Chairman Mao, portrayed as a stoic superhero (a.k.a. the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman, the Supreme Commander), appeared in all kinds of situations (inspecting factories, smoking a cigarette with peasant workers, standing by the Yangzi River in a bathrobe, presiding over the bow of a ship, or floating over a sea of red flags), flanked by strong, healthy, ageless men and "masculinized" women and children wearing baggy, sexless, drab clothing.

The goal of each poster was to show the Chinese people what sort of behavior was considered morally correct and how great the future of Communist China would be if everyone followed the same path to utopia by coming together. Combining fact and fiction in a way typical of propaganda art, these posters exuded positive vibes and seemed to suggest that Mao was an omnipresent force that would lead China to happiness and greatness.

This book brings together a selection of colorful propaganda artworks from photographer Michael Wolf´s vast collection of Chinese propaganda posters, many of which are now extremely rare.

288 pages
Softcover
Published by: Taschen
Publication date: 2003

CHF 20.00




       
        
Sitting in China

They are not elegant, nor are they always comfortable. But neither are they mass-produced: they are individuals. In China, the objects used for sitting are as manifold as the occasions for sitting. Each chair and stool has its own character, is a companion, a bastard, or a venerable elder. Their occupants sit close to the floor, introspective, watching the world go by, without the pressure of time.
But a photographer trying to document such a scene quickly becomes the focus of attention: people passing by wonder what is going on; the person on the chair assumes a pose, though the intent was to catch him or her unawares. Michael Wolf's photographs document the beauty of the ugly, the stretching of time, the art of improvisation, and the nature of the stool as a portrait of its user. Sometimes, a photographed chair was immediately confiscated by its owner: having lost its anonymity by being singled out as a photographically noteworthy object, it became an object of embarrassment, too shoddy to come once again into the camera's viewfinder.

160 pages
17 x 23 cm
Hardcover
Published by: Steidl
Publication date: 2003

CHF 100.00

Special edition comes with a unique bastard chair collected in China + a 24 x 33 cm c print.

CHF 400.00




 
China im Wandel

Michael Wolf moved to Hong Kong in 1995 for a period of intensive study of Chinese cultural identity and the complexities of Chinese urban architecture. He has to date published five photobooks on China, the first of which was "China im Wandel".

Two decades of industrial reforms have changed China more drastically than the cultural revolution.
Caught in the hype of modernisation ancient statues, traditional palaces and even entire city districts have become demolished. The old China now only exists "in between", such as in the once imperial cities like Pingyao, where modernisation seems to have just passed by; in the forgotten farming villages in Anhui; in the scant lived-in caves along the Yellow River; or in the back alleys of the capital. Michael Wolf together with author Harald Maass show the old China, but not only: they lead the reader to the people; into an unknown world of beauty and traditions, and to a culture that goes back thousands of years and has dared the step into modernity.

191 pages
Published by: Frederking & Thaler
Date: 2001

CHF 80.00



 
Maloche - Leben im Revier
Living conditions in a coal mining town in the Ruhr area of Germany

Published by: Eichborn Verlag
Publication date: 1982

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