Evelyn Hofer’s architecture-centric photographs of cities around the world often focused on the minutiae of buildings: cast iron cornices, the vast Gothic dome of Florence’s Duomo and the wedding cake balustrades of New York’s 19th century commercial buildings.
The German-American photographer cased those grand and humble urban spaces like a private eye, observing and sketching long before she photographed them, watching the movement of clouds and sunlight to find the ideal conditions for capturing them.
The High Museum exhibition “Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City,” the first major museum exhibition of her work in over 50 years, documents a span of time from 1959 through 1967 when Hofer worked in collaboration with various writers on a series of photo travel books dedicated to Florence, London, Dublin, New York, Spain and Washington, D.C., though her career in pictures — mostly editorial — lasted for half a century until her death at age 87 in Mexico City.
Some of those cityscapes are magnificent but can often pale next to the flesh and blood inhabitants on the streets down below. There are bar flies and church ladies, doormen, cab drivers, secretaries, rakish guards and cops and they often seem inseparable from the low-hanging skies and forlorn avenues of Dublin or the cherry blossom-laden trees and immaculate marble government buildings of Washington, D.C., as if they have absorbed the ambiance of their settings including the class divisions alluded to in the exhibition wall text.
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Among the more than 100 vintage prints on view, it’s Hofer’s photographs of people in “Eyes on the City” that stop you in your tracks: the tiny girl with a grubby mien and prematurely tired eyes straddling a too-big bicycle in “Bicycle Girl, in the Coombe, Dublin” or the Greenwich Village hipsters she captured in 1964 looking in their cotton dresses, messy hair and cardigans like timeless boho archetypes who could be discussing Coltrane and Heidegger in 1964 or 2004.
Her portraits feel steeped in empathy and capable of generating the occasional lump-in-your throat for subjects like the waifish “Tinker Girl, Dublin” (1966), pale and delicate and swaddled in a blanket. Hofer’s vantage feels, for the most part, extraordinarily kind, looking at the lot of the human animal with a measure of respect for their vanities and struggles.
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Like so many photographers before and after her (save the rare exception like chronicler of the well-heeled class Tina Barney), Hofer had access to the city’s underclass and less often a bead on their elites, though she does deliver some telling images of the corridors of power in her Washington, D.C., series; another place of tension between institutions and individuals. Her “Dr. Strangelove”-worthy money shot in 1965 of “The Joint Chiefs, Washington, DC” transfixes. Standing in exquisite formation with their rigid bearing, the joint chiefs of staffs’ doppelgänger reflections bounce off the buffed-to-a-high-sheen wooden conference table where they pose like chess pieces.
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
One of art history’s lesser known figures (like so many women artists), Hofer’s work was out of step with the trends of the time and, as a result, overlooked. She moved into color photography when her peers were still stuck on the street cred of black and white and she created formal, static portraits with a bulkier large-format camera when guys like Lee Friedlander were all about the quicksilver chaos of city life. Hofer harkened back to the static, serene human topography of August Sander and his farmers, confectioners and dour nuns.
In “Lorry Drivers, London” (1962) Hofer conveys the easy bonhomie of three colleagues taking a cigarette break, humoring her with a jovial glance in her direction. Her “Girl, Barcelona” (1963) is arresting in its strangeness, the sharp projections of this pretty but morose girl’s conical bra and beehive hairdo giving her a harsh Diane Arbus mood amplified by her rigid, tomb-like surroundings of cobblestones underfoot and pitted building walls behind her. She looks trapped by her setting or by the pitiless rigidity of her feminine armor.
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
Credit: Evelyn Hofer
In one tragedy-tinged image, “Blind Shepherd, Spain” (1963), Hofer captures an elderly shepherd draped in a rough-hewn blanket, standing against a windswept expanse of desolate field and gloomy sky — a setting as dire as Emily Bronte’s Yorkshire moors. As with so many of her shots, it lends dignity and gravitas to an ordinary person. But wall text offers insight into the empathetic dynamic that extended behind the scenes, as a conversation plays out between the man and Hofer and she learns even more about his sad, lonely life.
VISUAL ART REVIEW
“Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City”
Through Aug. 13. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $16.50 ages 6 and above; free for children 5 and younger and members. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4444, high.org.
Bottom line: With a rare empathy Evelyn Hofer’s photographs chronicle the dignity and heartache of the human condition in engrossing portraits.
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