TC #39, 2008

"It was like an Edward Hopper painting. In fact, I was greatly influenced by Hopper, taking these photographs—even walking along the streets at night and looking into restaurants. It was almost a cliché. You'd see these Nighthawks-like scenes at eleven at night—two people sitting at a table discussing things or a waiter wiping a table—and so Hopper's paintings were in my mind while taking these."

—Michael Wolf

Chicago, like many urban centers throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge in new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf to be an artist-in-residence. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux.

This very special limited-edition photograph, TC#39, is part of Wolf's first body of work to address an American city and is included in the book The Transparent City (Museum of Contemporary Photography/Aperture, 2008).

Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in The Transparent City his details are fragments of life—digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged—snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses: Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner. The material resonates with all the formalism of the constructed, architectonic work for which Wolf is well-known but also emphasizes the conceptual underpinnings of his ongoing engagement with the idea of how modern life unfolds within the framework of the ever-growing contemporary city.

C-Print
Image Size: 19 7/8 x 24 15/16 inches
Paper Size: 24 x 29 inches
Edition of 25 + 5 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Michael Wolf (b. 1954, Munich, Germany; d. 2019, Cheung Chau, Hong Kong) was a German-born artist and photographer who had a unique approach to documenting daily life in big cities. Primarily working in Hong Kong and Paris, he captured photographs of human life and interactions within the city’s architectural patterns and structures. Wolf studied at UC Berkley and the University of Essen with Otto Steinert in Germany. His books include Sitting in China (2002), Hong Kong, Front Door/Back Door (2005), and The Transparent City (Museum of Contemporary Photography/Aperture, 2008).