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The Resonant Photography of Evelyn Hofer
Evelyn Hofer was born in Germany (1922) and died in Mexico (2009), and was all-in about photography. Her body of work offers a hinge between the objective and American-Colour traditions; and has been accurately titled as “the most famous unknown photographer in America”. Her lens was mainly filled with human and architectural subjects, and in her later years,she turned her camera towards still-life images. But despite the somewhat isolated photographic genres she got involved with, her overall aesthetic shares a resonant tranquillity that offers a slow paced visual consumption experience.
At the age of eleven, her family fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland; an event that in my opinion, influenced her interest towards visual expression, same which eventually found a solid ground in photography. Meaning that she got seriously interested in the discipline at a privileged young age. Her determination, routed her towards the profession; and quickly became an apprentice at a portrait studio in her new hometown. There, she also took private lessons from the German photographer Hans Finsler, who happened to be one of the pioneers behind the “new objectivity” artistic movement, the same which might have settled the foundations of what we now relate to the Becher or the Düsseldorf school. And pretty much like August Sander (1876–1964), she seemed to be drawn towards the overall…
