If you look too quickly at Candida Hofer's photographs of modern and contemporary interiors, you are likely to think that they are the opposite of what they are. You will see cold empty hard rooms devoid of human presence, and you will think, "Oh, another Antonioni-esque vision of modern depersonatization and anxiety." In fact, these photographs, lingered over, become personal, soft, warm, even blissful. Hofer has-quite uniquely-experienced the macho rigor and stripped down essentialism of Modernists like Mies as beneficent, gently enveloping, offering a kind of grace. And that is because she loves and captures the way that flat hard bare surfaces, especially of polished concrete and metal, can display and intensify light. (She is drawn to-or hired to photograph-architecture that uses solid elemental materials: the opposite of Junkspace.)
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