Evelyn Hofer
German-American, 1922-2009
Girl with Bicycle, Dublin, 1966
dye transfer print
16 1/2 × 13 1/4 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by PhotoFutures
2017.29.1
" In reality, all we photographers photograph is ourselves in the other...all the time." - Evelyn Hofer
COMMENTS
There is something defiant about the way this girl addresses the camera. The bicycle she awkwardly straddles is far too big for her; if she were to attempt to ride off, we can imagine her jerky departure. The girl is dwarfed by the wide road, staunch brick buildings, and heavy sky. Still, she turns to face us head on, unwavering. In her typical documentary style, Evelyn Hofer has carefully composed this photograph to turn an unspectacular moment of everyday life into a meditation on coming-of-age.
After her family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Switzerland, Hofer decided to become a photographer. She obtained an apprenticeship and diligently studied technique, theory, and the chemistry involved in producing prints. She worked for magazines in New York before turning to fine art and editorial photography.
While collaborating with travel authors, Hofer spent time in various locations, including Florence, Paris, and Dublin, where this photograph was taken. An early innovator of color photography, Hofer used color to direct attention to her subjects. In this image, the girl’s red stockings and pink shirt set her apart from the subdued greens and greys of the street.
https://www.high.org/collections/bicycle-girl-in-the-coombe-dublin/
Evelyn Hofer worked as a photographer starting in the mid-1940s. Her work is inextricably bound up with the books she illustrated in the late 1950s and 1960s for acclaimed authors such as Mary McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett. Her work in those years unforgettably evokes the atmosphere of places like Florence, London, Spain, New York, Washington and Dublin. In 1986, Evelyn Hofer took a similar approach in her series, Emerson in Italy. Her photographs are also well-known from their appearance in such magazines as Life, London Times Magazine and New York Times Magazine. And yet, she is still “the most famous 'unknown' photographer in America.”
Evelyn Hofer was uncompromising in her commitment to honesty and directness in her pictures and exhibited a deep empathy and understanding that allowed her to bring out the innate beauty in her subjects. She seemed to have an intuitive talent for getting to the essence of each object or person she photographed. One senses that she took plenty of time to get to know her subject before taking up her camera. She needed time to arrive at where she wanted to be, to become part of what she was trying to capture or to generate a certain intimacy with her subject. This meant for her - and through her photographs, for us, as well - apprehending the underlying nature of her subject. Until she discovered just what that was, she was not ready to take the picture. Creating a personal connection was her basic prerequisite for any photograph. Recording the essential and unchanging was her goal.
Evelyn Hofer was never one to follow the latest artistic trends. Her work is more classic than avant-garde, although her pictures are undoubtedly characteristic witnesses of their times. She had a finely tuned eye for proportion, form, color and light. Her compositions are subtle and well thought-out. And since she had a brilliant grasp of the technical side of the medium, she had no need for special effects. For her, the technology was merely the means to an end--achieving just the picture she wanted. Her work is not suffused with the explanatory, investigative drive of documentary photography. She was not out to astound or surprise her viewers. This is all the more remarkable when one appreciates the unconditional accuracy of her perception and her attention to the most minute details. However, a portrait by Evelyn Hofer, for example, never has the effect of unmasking or laying bare her sitter. Even as she subjects the sitter to her unstinting gaze and renders details with painstaking clarity, her appraisal is tempered with a warm-hearted sympathy that one can sense in the final photograph. She was the one who once advised photographers to choose an extremely long exposure time for portraits in order to allow for more of the subject's personality to come through in the picture.
https://www.galeriespringer.de/wp-content/uploads/PM_Hofer_en.pdf
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
At eleven years old, Evelyn Hofer was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Germany with her family, eventually resettling in a series of international locations, including Geneva, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City. In the midst of these rapidly changing surroundings, the fledgling artist learned to quickly discern the essence of a place, and the unique characteristics of strangers passing on the street. She also became one of the first fine art photographers to work in color, using a 4x5-inch view camera and complex dye transfer printing process that required chemistry lessons to perfect. The result was a series of dreamy, poignant photographs such as Girl with Bicycle, Dublin. Although Dublin of the 1960s was in the midst of transformation—with new shops, cars, and suburbs for the working class—this tranquil image depicts a precocious child having a moment of fun in an otherwise uninhabited street. Greatly admired in literary circles, Hofer was asked to illustrate books on Dublin, London, Paris, Washington, D.C., and many more. So impressed was critic Hilton Kramer that he affectionately called her “the most famous unknown photographer in America.”
- A Brilliant Spectrum, 2019