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A Tribute to Photographer, Evelyn Hofer
By | Photos to Inspire |
Mar 17, 2010
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Evelyn Hofer, was a photographer who collaborated on a renowned series of travel books with writers in the 1950s and 1960s. She died last year at 87, in Mexico City.
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| 2006 photo, copyright - Andreas Pauly |
Her camera of choice was a four- by five-inch viewfinder camera. Hofer photographed her subjects on location but preferred composed scenes with a timeless feel.
Hofer was a flawless technician, she searched, as she put it, for an inside value, some interior respect in the people she photographed, mostly in black and white. Her architectural photographs seemed to eliminate the distractions of the here and now.
Ms. Hofer's portraits owed much to the German photographer August Sander and put her at odds with the candid, on-the-fly photography of contemporaries like Robert Frank. Hilton Kramer, the preeminent art critic for the New York Times at the time, was an avid supporter her work both in person and in print, although she had never received a museum show in the United States. In 1994 the Musea de l'Elyse in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented a retrospective of her work, called "The Universal Eye."
"She has an extraordinary eye for subtle differences in the quality of light and in the details of texture and shape, whether her subject is the Duomo in Florence or two young waiters in a Dublin restaurant, and she has extraordinary patience, too, in capturing from every subject the exact image she intends to wrest from it," Mr. Kramer wrote in 1977, who reviewed an exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in Manhattan. "She is, in my opinion, one of the living masters of her medium."
Evelyn Elvira Hofer was born on Jan. 21, 1922, in Marburg, Germany, where her father was in the pharmaceuticals business. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, her anti-Nazi father took the family to Geneva and later to Madrid.
Hofer intended to become a concert pianist and applied to the Paris Conservatory but failed acceptance. She then apprenticed photographers in Zurich and Basel, with private lessons in Zurich with Hans Finsler, who was known for "object photography."
After Franco's victory in Spain the Hofers emigrated to Mexico, where she began working as a professional photographer and finding the images that became part of her first book, "The Pleasures of Mexico" (1957).
Her career began after she arrived in New York in 1946 working with Alexey Brodovitch, the great art director of Harper's Bazaar. In New York she became friends with the artist Richard Lindner, a fellow German, who took her artistic education in hand and, she later said, "showed me how to look."
In her later years she photographed the Basque country of Spain and its people, as well as the village of Soglio in Switzerland, where she spent her summers. She also produced a number of lush, painterly still-life photographs, in color, using the dye-transfer process. Many of these images were included in the monograph "Evelyn Hofer," published by Steidl in 2005.
An exhibition honoring a lifetime of Evelyn Hofer's work will be exhibited at The Rose Gallery located in the Bergamot Station, Santa Monica CA, from March 20-May 1st.
rosegallery.net
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© Copyright 2010 by PHOTOWORKSHOP.COM
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Last Updated: Jul 10th, 2010 - 16:19:44
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