Michael Wolf

Wolf died in April 2019 in Cheung Chau, Hong Kong.

In an interview, Wolf said that shooting in Chicago convinced him to switch from film to digital. "For most of my first major series Architecture of Density, I shot with a 4×5 film camera," he said. "But when it came to shooting Chicago—which is a very windy city—the slightest gust of wind would vibrate the tripod, and I suspected many of my photographs would be ruined." Shooting digital allowed him to review the days' images, and guaranteed the precision Wolf wanted. "There’s nothing accidental in my photos," he added in the same interview.

Tokyo Compression was part of Metropolis, City Life in the Urban Age, the 2011 Noorderlicht Photofestival. One of Wolf's pictures was used for the poster, the cover of the catalogue and all media material of the exhibition.

Wolf won an honorable mention in Daily Life in the 2011 World Press Photo competition for his A Series of Unfortunate Events work. Wolf supposed that this would be controversial because some people would think that the appropriation of Google Street View screens did not constitute photojournalism.

Articles about the book connected the photographs to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. One reviewer described the book as "frightening," causing a feeling of "remoteness." The series was controversial because some people felt that the cropped and enlarged photographs of people in the buildings constituted an invasion of privacy. In 2010, the series was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet.

In the 2010 book Tokyo Compression, Wolf presented portraits of Japanese people inside crowded Tokyo subway trains who had been pressed against a window. The commuters' expressions were characterized in one review as "traumatised" and "woeful." Wolf stated that some people closed their eyes or hid their faces with their hands upon realizing that they were being photographed.

One reviewer concluded that Wolf's Architecture of Density, Transparent City, and Tokyo Compression series represented a progression from long shot to close-up. Wolf won a first prize in Daily Life in the 2009 World Press Photo competition for his Tokyo Compression work. Martin Parr selected the 2010 book as one of the 30 most influential photobooks published between 2001 and 2010.

In 2006, Wolf took photographs of residents in their rooms in a building in Hong Kong's oldest public housing complex, the Shek Kip Mei Estate, which was going to be demolished. He used a wide-angle lens to show as much of the interiors of the rooms as possible. Each room was approximately 100 square feet (9.3 m) in size, and he displayed photographs of 100 rooms, leading to the name "100x100." In an interview, Wolf likened the series to a scientific project, "an investigation into the use of limited space." The Inside volume of Wolf's two-volume book Hong Kong Inside Outside of 2009 contained the complete photographs from this series.

A series shot in downtown Chicago beginning in 2006 that "combine[d] impersonal cityscapes shot primarily at dusk or at night with details of the buildings’ inhabitants" became the basis for the 2008 book Transparent City. The photographs were taken from rooftops at dusk with a long lens. As in the Architecture of Density series, the exterior photographs excluded the horizon and the sky, leaving the windows of the buildings as the main subjects. In one interview, Wolf said that he came upon the idea of showing close-ups of people in the windows after he noticed a man giving him the finger in a photograph. In another interview, Wolf cited the artistic work of Edward Hopper as an inspiration for the series because of its voyeuristic nature and its inclusion of architectural details.

The first book containing images from the series, Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door, was published in 2005. One review noted the book's "representation of an overpopulated city emptied of its human presence" and praised "the visual intelligence of Wolf's photographs." The Outside volume of Wolf's two-volume 2009 book Hong Kong Inside Outside contained a more extensive selection of photographs from this series.

Between 2005 and 2007, Wolf photographed painters in Shenzhen, China, who reproduced famous works of art such as Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh. Each portrait consisted of a "copy artist" along with an example of a copied work. The settings were described as "dirty alleyways and street corners." One reviewer wrote that the pictures "document intimate cultural and economic facets of globalization even as they record and complicate critical dilemmas about authenticity and the non-economic values of art." The series was collected in his book Real Fake Art published in 2011.

Wolf began non-editorial photography with a series entitled Bastard Chairs, small chairs that Chinese people would repair repeatedly using whatever materials were available. Wolf reports that the police detained him twice during the photographing of the series for "doing something which was harmful to the Chinese state." Photographs from the series were published in a 2002 book entitled Sitting in China. Although Wolf called the bastard chairs a "great symbol of the Chinese people's thriftiness and resourcefulness," and the book received positive reviews in the West, some Chinese people felt that the photographs made China appear "backward."

Wolf began his career in 1994 as a photojournalist, spending eight years working in Hong Kong for the German magazine Stern. He said that a decline in the magazine industry led to photojournalism assignments becoming "stupid and boring." In 2003 he decided to work only on fine-art photography projects.

Michael Wolf (30 July 1954 – 24 April 2019) was a German artist and photographer whose work focused on daily life in big cities. Wolf won first prize in the Contemporary Issues category of the 2004 World Press Photo competition for his photographs of workers in several types of factories for an article in Stern. He lived and worked in Hong Kong and Paris.

Wolf was born in 1954 in Munich, Germany, and was raised in the United States, Europe, and Canada. He attended the North Toronto Collegiate Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1976 he obtained a degree in visual communication at the University of Essen, Germany, where he studied with Otto Steinert.