Candida Hofer
This portrait of the German photographer Candida Hofer and her husband Herbert was made in 2014, at the home of RongRong and inri, the artist couple who have created the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in the Caochangdi arts district of Beijing. Candida and I were jurors there for an annual award competition for Chinese photographers.
Candida's lush work describes the interiors of extraordinary buildings, august libraries and museums, generally from the 17th-19th Centuries. They are grand, richly colored prints made with a large format camera. Striking in their extraordinary detail, they revel in the grandiosity of these ornate places. The images are carefully symmetrical in their composition and the architecture often encourages that. The spaces are so precisely depicted and so balanced that there is an air of perfection about them. Perfection is not an animated characteristic. It can admit no alteration or imbalance and thus her images are unpeopled, and utterly still. One can spend time profitably considering what her statement about such temples of high culture might be. Are these monuments to a past mode of cultural transmission? Are they worshipful paeans to the presentation of grand ideas in elaborate treasure houses? Are they expressions of societal power? Are the buildings themselves relics or reliquaries? This is, of course a topic she is under no obligation to discuss. Her images embody her statement.
Candida Hofer is reserved and precise in conversation. She seems as though she might possess an austere personality. But she is far from stern and humorless. Candida and Herbert both favor elegant and spare couture. She caries a small camera, (it is not her working equipment) which identifies that she hopes to take memories home with her. Externally there seems to be nothing extraneous about her. In essence, like most mature artists, her work is congruent with her personality. Here, Candida's and Herbert's postures, and their spare but elegant presentation signifies their characters. They appear to personify restraint, an embodiment of what has been called the "art clergy," but I found them playful, clever and a pleasure to be around.