Candida Höfer

Since the end of the 1970s, Candida Höfer (born 1944, lives and works in Cologne) has been photographing interiors in public and semi-public spaces from different architectural epochs, spaces that are accessible to the public -- gathering spaces, places of communication, science, or recreation: hotels, lobbies, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches, health resorts, zoological gardens. The works are not studies in typological registration, rather they are looking for the similarities and the differences behind the similarities. Höfers photographs, for the most part exclusive of people and shot with the natural lighting of the shooting scene, evoke different overlaying time levels: the one of the origin of the architecture, the one of the present use of it, and the one of the shooting itself. «My work derives from the snapshot. It is the form of photography that most closely stands for love.» Nan Goldin, born 1953 in Washington DC, lives and works in Paris. Every one of Goldin's photographs is like a window opening on a labyrinthine body of stories - some happy some tragic. Her work is documentary in the best sense: it hews close to the world she knows, but it also indulges in the self-dramatization and pathos that together constitute a post-modern version of Romanticism. Nan Goldin's photographs have become touchstones of the contemporary visual imagination, avidly collected all over the world and assimilated into the mainstream.