Candida Hofer Quotes

Germany, Photographer
February 4, 1944

Candida Höfer is a Cologne, Germany-based photographer and a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students – Axel Hütte, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth – Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards.

I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them.

Candida Hofer
- Church
- Purpose
- Waiting
Spaces may or may not invite the image - if they do, they mostly do it with their spatial layers of time... It is then the image that takes the place of the space; the image in its own right.

Candida Hofer
- Space
- Layers
- Invites

I do my work. My work is my statement. Generally, I think, there is too much interest in what an artist has to say. Or what she or he looks like, instead of what she or he does.

Candida Hofer