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 Manuela Höfer
born in 1965 in Jena/Thüringen, former East Germany
Through apprenticeships in a black & white lab and a portrait & advertising studio, she mastered traditional printing
techniques and learned how to make her darkroom experimentation appealing to a wider audience. This innovation carried her
through a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Prague Academy and earned her the Hasselblad Fine Art Award in 1995 for a series of
nudes.
Höfer's understanding of an audience's demands encouraged her to expand the market for photography, beginning with her
own work. What began in 1996 as a small stall at an antique arcade in Chelsea has since grown into a gallery and shop - The
Hofer Printroom in Bloomsbury. The focus of the first half of her career has been on building bridges between artist and
audience. With this goal in mind, she conceived and organised the 1997 London Contemporary Photography Fair at the Strand
Palace Hotel, which was such a success that it demanded encores in 1998 and 1999, and later expanded to Berlin in 2001 and
2002.
While she was orchestrating these events, Höfer's interest in her own photography never faded, and to date she has
completed nearly a dozen photography projects. Throughout her career, she has sustained the ability to renew her approach to
everyday subjects. She is best known for her experimental photogram series "Wrapped", which documents disposable commercial
packaging, and her "Urban Perspectives" series, which captures the peace and chaos of city life.
Berlin - Multiple views: In her photography, Manuela Höfer manages to express the very complex
experience of a city - its mood, pace and life. This tension is best seen in her double-exposure colour images: an open,
daylight city shot turned claustrophobic by the overlay of a close-up sidewalk or streams of night traffic. Manuela
Höfer explores the movement of Berlin as well as other cities like London and New York in her Multiple Views series, in
which she shoots an entire roll of film, reloads it and exposes the film for a second time. This simple technique expresses
the relentless pace of a city, wherein it is impossible to focus wholly on any one subject.
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