Industiral Chic: Candida Hofer's Photographs

Take in your hand a long Russian novel, The Brothers Karamazov, say. Tear out four of every five pages. Go to a golf course in a gated community in Southern Florida, and read those pages. Alone, in a basement and out of the cold, I had a similar experience. The exhibit of Candida Hšfer's Photographs at the Rose Museum is stunning, but it is small, fragmentary, and out of place.

Of course, just as the Dostoyevsky would gain something from such a dislocation, so too do the photographs. There are 11 photographs, all from the last four years--nine that are 120 centimeters square and two that are slightly smaller. The nine square photographs are on loan from the Sonnabend Gallery, in New York, with which Hofer has had a long association. The two smaller squares, both photographs taken within the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, are courtesy of the Rena Bransten Gallery, in San Francisco. The photographs exhibited are selections from three different series that Hoferhas done, one of libraries, one of museums, and one of office spaces.The current exhibition space is tucked away within the Rose Art Museum, at Brandeis University. The Rose Art Museum is a haven for contemporary art in New England. A water fountain in the next room provides a constant sonic backdrop for the exhibit, which unfolds in a single room. We begin with Deichmanske Bibliothek Oslo III (2000), which, like three of the other photographs in the exhibit, is taken from Hšfers series on libraries. 80 of these pictures were exhibited recently in the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerlandthe selection here only begins to give us a sense for Hšfers perception of space. As in the other photographs in the exhibit, of museums and offices, Hofer portrays the communal space in a stark manner that nonetheless has the ability to humanize.

For the most part, the images are devoid of people. The figures of the few people who do appear have a mystical, almost-present quality as a result of the long exposure times Hoferuses.

The consistent size of the images confirms Hofer's documentary aim. In several of the library photographs, we can almost make out the titles on the sides of the books, but not quite. The size almost seems to have been chosen with this aim in mind. This aim crystallizes when "Deichmanske Bibliothek Oslo III" is juxtaposed with "Wikingsmuseum Oslo I," which portrays an old Norse ship that leaps out of the frame, prow-forward. The singularity of purpose in this image, taken with the well-composed light streaming in from windows, imparts a striking ecclesiastical quality to the work. Hofer refrains, however, from photographing places of worship--an absence that is striking.

Articles of furniture bring out what is exceptional about Hofer. In "MOCA Los Angeles," Hofer presents a modern conference room, where we glimpse the reflection of an overhead projector and a person's head. What is striking is the sequence of ergonomic chairs and their shadows on the left-hand side. We see chairs reappear in a lecture hall, mustering for a march against the grand piano that stands on the stage. Hofer inverts the relationship between the animate and inanimate and thus makes us that much more aware of the rooms we inhabit.

The three-dimensional quality of Hofer's work is brought out in the closing triptych of the "Kunsthalle Karlsruhe." In this photograph, a room is portrayed from three different angles. There are barely sufficient points of commonality to establish that this is indeed a single room. As we make the identification, the room, flooded with light, springs out in what must be every realtor's dream; we are transported from the empty room we stand in to the empty room that is being sold to us.

Hoferwas born in 1944 in Everswalde, Germany. She grew up in Cologne and was an assistant to Werner Bokelberg in Hamburg before becoming, in 1976, a student of the influential photographer Bernd Becher. Since 1976 when he was named

Professor of Photography, Becher and his wife Hilla ran a very small but influential class at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. Among their other students were Thomas Ruff, Petra Wunderlich, and Andreas Gursky, who was recently featured in a profile by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker (January 22, 2001). The Bechers pioneered a type of detached objectivity in their photography. Despite their preference for black and white, Hofer, like many of their other students, has turned to color. This shift relieved Hoferof the burden of developing: in a 1994 interview in the Journal of Contemporary Art, she stated: "I have gone from black and white to color and now everything is very comfortable for me ... I did not like the darkness of the darkroom."Hofer is now out of the darkroom, and the 11 photographs on view at the Rose Museum are an impressive testament to her talent. However, one cannot escape the sense that Hofer's statement about the nature of public spaces is largely lost outside the larger context of her work.