Michael Wolf: The Transparent City
The ground is nowhere in sight in Wolf’s dramatically geometric, nearly abstract photographs of Chicago’s Loop towers. Shot from strategically selected rooftops and perfectly printed in an aptly large, vertical book, Wolf’s subtly modulated color photographs are monumental studies in grays, whites, blacks, golds, and occasional splashes of green and blue. Given their elegant grids, nuanced variations, and stillness, these images echo the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, yet this is the real world, and real people inhabit these immense cellular buildings, these boxy hives, these human filing cabinets, and Wolf’s stealthy, intrusive lens finds them, most often alone contemplating a television or computer. The lighting is exquisitely moody, each lit interior is a screen or stage, each human figure as poignant as those in the paintings of Edward Hopper, an artist Wolf, acclaimed for his earlier books on China, cites as an influence. With intimations of surveillance and vulnerability, these intensely beautiful cityscapes seem austere and inhuman until one lands on a magnified picture of a man giving the distant photographer the finger. --Donna Seaman