Eberswalde, Germany. Photography.

Candida Höfer is a German photographer, living in Cologne and one of the representatives of the so-called Düsseldorf School. She was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, Brandenburg province, and is the daughter of journalist Werner Höfer.

In 1968 Candida began working in newspapers as a portrait photographer and later, studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Specifically, between 1973-1976 she studied film with Ole John and between 1976-1982 on photography with Bernd & Hilla Becher, whose decisive influence went from a photography of a more social nature in the seventies to a photographic practice marked by nudity, simplicity, and objectivity on spaces of representation and public utility, emptied of all human presence. Along with Thomas Ruff she was one of Becher's first disciples to use color, showing her work in slide projections.

Between 1973 and 1978 Höfer works on her series Turks in Germany in which she reflects the life of Turkish immigrant workers, although it was in 1979 while she was studying in Düsseldorf when she began taking color photographs of the interiors of public buildings such as such as offices, banks and waiting rooms. The usual format for your photos is 38 x 38 cm or 38 x 57 cm.

Her photographs investigate the shapes and structures of spaces, as well as the details that make it up. Examine the contradictions between intention and actual use, as well as the layers of historical change. This approach allows her a very personal portrait of the spaces. Her images invite us to take time to discover and reflect on what spaces do with us and what we do with them.

In her more abstract recent works, Candida Höfer focuses on the importance of details and their role in the aesthetic perception of space. For the presentation of her work, she not only uses traditional photography in variable sizes adjusted to the demands of the composition, but also shows her work in projections recalling her early participation in the cinema and her appreciation of image sequences, an approach that also take in your book publications that you see sequential exhibition spaces.

Since she began to exhibit individually in 1975, her work has been the subject of presentations at the Portikus, Frankfurt (1992); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (1993); Kunstverein of Wolfsburg (1998); Kunstverein Bassel, Basel (1999); The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2000), of a major retrospective that toured Seattle, Philadelphia, Utah and Tennessee (2006-2007), and of other solo shows at the Musée de Louvre, Paris, IMMA, Dublin, and CCB, Lisbon (2006); Caixa Forum, Barcelona (2007); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008); Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, and Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2009); MARCO, Vigo, and CAAC, Seville (2010); Museum fur Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2011, 2012); Museum KunstPalast, Düsseldorf (2013-2014); Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (2015); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin (2016); Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo (2017); Amparo Museum in Puebla (2018).