Stroll through time and space; witness spirituality, creation, and the love of family; experience joy, sorrow, laughter, faith, and hope; question, reason, and perhaps agree with theories on cloning humans, UFOs, alien contact, and abduction experiences.In these pages, Dr. Michael Wolf addresses the topics of art, science, and religion, and encourages an understanding of the connection between time and space, the continuing creation of the universe, the impact of environmental hazards on this biosphere, and his classified work for the U.S. government.For those with open minds and hearts, this intricately woven tapestry, "The Catchers of Heaven," can be life-changing. Wolf takes us to the edge of a new realization, where we glimpse what may be happening throughout the far reaches of the universe.Dr. Wolf, Chancellor Emeritus of The New England Institute for Advanced Research, is a patron and member of The New York Academy of Sciences and The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In Hong Kong Corner Houses, the internationally renowned German photographer Michael Wolf continues with his visual quest for the overlooked and underappreciated urban phenomena that give a city its special character. This time, he draws our attention to Hong Kong's urban corners and buildings that are often inconspicuous amid the high-rise, high-density urban clutter of Hong Kong. These ordinary residential-commercial buildings of 1950s and 1960s vintage represent the expression of local Chinese pragmatism and expediency in the economic austerity of early postwar decades. The photographic presentation captures the inherent paradoxes of their architectural character: the quiet prominence, attractive banality, and tectonic chaos that give urban Hong Kong its endearing quality. Complementing the superb photographs of Michael Wolf, Hong Kong Corner Houses features an essay and extended captions by two of Hong Kong's best-known academics in the field of architectural conservation, Drs. Lynne DiStefano and Lee Ho Yin. 在《街頭街尾》一書裏，國際聞名的德國攝影師 Michael Wolf 再次運用敏銳的觀察力，尋覓一些常被忽略和忽視的香港城市現象，令讀者重新發現，隱藏在高樓林立的市區中別具風格的「街頭街尾」建築。 《街頭街尾》內所載的建築物，皆是五、六十年代的商住大廈。它們的出現，反映了香港華人在戰後的艱難條件下，如何運用務實的設計，應付迅速增長的屋宇需求。在這些其貌不揚、平平無奇和看似雜亂無章的建築物當中，Michael Wolf 以卓越的攝影技巧，捕捉了它們生氣勃勃的一面，換化成令人細味的影像。這些充滿矛盾的特點正是香港引人入勝之處。 本書有幸邀請了香港大學著名的建築文物保護學者李浩然博士（Lee Ho Yin）和狄麗玲博士（Lynne DiStefano），為《街頭街尾》撰寫緒言及補充圖片說明。

摄影师 Michael Wolf 的生前最后一本摄影集，作品是香港海湾日出的壮观自然景象，并拓展到绘画和自由的领域。 在过去的两年里，每天早上5:30到7:30之间，迈克尔•沃尔夫一直在他位于香港长洲海岸上的家中拍摄日出的照片。 从而形成一个新系列的概念，灵感来自绘画和地形摄影。 这些永恒而短暂的自然景观的迷人镜头，与他之前的作品形成了鲜明的对比，后者强调了大城市空间的缺乏和人类对经济条件的适应。 在他的社会批判性作品中，沃尔夫的《发现天堂和地平线》应被理解为自由的草稿，在一个与极端的工作和生活条件同义的地方。

© geoff manaugh, from the essay "transparent city." When Michael Wolf and I first sat down to discuss the images contained in this book, Wolf pointed out one shot in particular. Like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic film Blow Up, Wolf had found himself working late in the studio one night, going over a batch of recent photos from Chicago. The photos were of buildings, of course—very large buildings, with lots of windows, like J. G. Ballard’s high-rise. At some point in the evening, Wolf zoomed in randomly on one of the windows while scanning the image for flaws. But he noticed something: there was a man in the photograph—and he was giving Wolf the finger. Inspired by the find, Wolf went back through every photo he’d taken in the city thus far, methodically scanning, passing from one window to the next, row by row, as if deciphering a hidden text. In that newly committed act of visual interpretation, a key aspect to the project was born: when you look into the lives of others, the lives of others might be looking at you. I asked Wolf about this, about zooming in through 112 megapixels onto a window that might have filled a mere two or three percent of the original photograph, only to see, through a haze of pixellation, a face or a hand or a group of people at a conference table, talking. It’s as if the photograph contains its own universe, I suggested, a blurred microcosm of grain and circumstance, and if you have a powerful enough camera you can actually climb inside. Between voyeurism and photography, then, what is to be discovered when you’re out there watching windows? Wolf, perhaps unsurprisingly, replied: "What I found, actually, is how boring everyday life is. When I thought about it, one of the fantasies that I had was that I would get up onto these rooftops every night—for four or five or six hours—and I would look into hundreds of windows, and I would see all these thrilling things going on. But, ultimately, all I saw was either people sitting and reading or people sitting in front of a computer. In the condominiums, it was people sitting in front of big flat-screen TVs eating dinner—and there were a lot of people alone. It was like an Edward Hopper painting. In fact, I was greatly influenced by Hopper, taking these photographs—even walking along the streets at night and looking into restaurants. It was almost a cliché. You’d see these Nighthawks-like scenes at eleven at night—two people sitting at a table discussing things or a waiter wiping a table—and so Hopper’s paintings were in my mind while taking these. But it was a little sad to see, night after night, in all these buildings, that it was really just single people between the ages of twenty-five and forty, tired after work, sitting on the sofa watching TV. I was a bit disillusioned. I thought it would be more exciting than that." more@http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/transparent_city_details/index.html

For more than 14 years German photographer Michael Wolf has been living in Hong Kong. Focused on the specific visual elements he has depicted high density living in one of the world's most crowded cities like nobody has before. HONG KONG INSIDE OUTSIDE combines two major series of his work titled Architecture of Density and 100 x 100. For Architecture of Density, Wolf fashioned a distinctive style of photography. He removes any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattens the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer's eye. Wolf photographs crumbling buildings in need of repair, brand new buildings under construction covered in bamboo scaffolding, as well as fully occupied residential complexes. Wolf's disorienting vantage point gives the viewer the feeling that the buildings extend indefinitely, which perhaps is the spatial experience of Hong Kong's inhabitants. As a way to investigate the social ramifications of living in such dense conditions, with his series 100 x 100 Wolf juxtaposes the anonymity of the exterior residential complexes in Architecture of Density with interior portraits of 100 individuals and families surrounded by all their belongings living in public housing consisting of identical 100-square-foot apartments allocated to each family. He obtains the same vantage point for each picture forming a typology that allows the viewer to study how the individuals make the confined spaces their own.

In front of typical Chinese urban backdrops young Chinese women and men present oil paintings by American and European artists from different epochs: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Warhol, Ruscha, Hockney, Magritte, Hopper, Richter, Da Vinci. All pictures of a multi-million dollar industry. A production of copies of popular artworks, which are sold at giveaway prices into the whole world. Van Gogh: $75.00, Warhol: $45.00, Ruscha: $50.00. The handpainted copies mainly come from China, the buyers can almost entirely be found in the United States and Europe, the countries of origin of the unaffordable originals. Wolf photographed the Chinese copy-artists and has placed manifold relations between the pictured subject, the urban environment and the portrayed artists. Essay by Boris von Brauchitsch.

To many people, back alleys are dark and dirty places that draw neither fascination nor inspiration. But not to the internationally renowned German Photographer Michael Wolf, who has been fascinated and inspired by the happenings in Hong Kong’s back alleys. His new book Informal Solutions: Observations In Hong Kong Back Alleys (2016) is a documentation of his discoveries through his past 13 years of exploration.

They are not elegant, nor are they always comfortable. But neither are they mass-produced: they are individual. In China, the objects used for sitting are as manifold as the occasions for sitting. Each chair and stool has its own character, is a companion, a bastard, or a venerable elder. Their occupants sit close to the floor, introspective, watching the world go by, without the pressure of time. But a photographer trying to document such a scene quickly becomes the focus of attention: people passing by wonder what is going on; the person on the chair assumes a pose, though the intent was to catch him or her unawares. Michael Wolf's photographs document the beauty of the ugly, the stretching of time, the art of improvisation, and the nature of the stool as a portrait of its user. Sometimes, a photographed chair was immediately confiscated by its owner: having lost its anonymity by being singled out as a photographically noteworthy object, it became an object of embarrassment, too shoddy to come once again into the camera's viewfinder.

With 'Tokyo Compression' Michael Wolf struck a nerve. His portraits of people who are on their way in the Tokyo subway, constrained between glass, steel and fellow travelers, have won many awards and were shown in exhibitions around the globe. The first edition of this book was sold out after a few weeks. And the topic kept haunting Michael Wolf as well. He returned to Tokyo in order to immerse in the subsurface insanity once again and this time even deeper. Now with 'Tokyo Compression Three' the third, completely revised edition is published, with many so far unreleased images and an entirely new 'hidden track' at the end of the book.

《繁華都市小小神》是自2011年香港大學出版社與德籍攝影師吳爾夫合作出版的《街頭街尾》之後的又一精彩著作。此書以香港鬧市中的土地神位為題材，通過吳爾夫以慧眼看世界的攝影，使讀者對這些隨處可見、看似無奇的東西另眼相看。香港著名的文物保育學者及專家李浩然和狄麗玲，亦再次為吳爾夫的攝影集撰文。他們以淺喻深的文字，令讀者更深入了解土地神，從而更好地欣賞每張土地神位的照片。 《繁華都市小小神》以拜土地為題材，闡述傳統習俗在香港鬧市中的存亡現狀，是一本誘發深思及令人反省的合時之作。 Following the success of Hong Kong Corner Houses (2011), German photographer Michael Wolf continues with his collaboration with Hong Kong University Press to produce Small God, Big City. Michael again uses his creative eye to draw attention to overlooked objects in the visually rich urban environment of Hong Kong. This time, the object is the Earth God shrine, found commonly by the doorways of shops and homes throughout Hong Kong. Through his visually stimulating and thought- provoking photographs, Michael challenges our sensitivity to seemingly familiar everyday things. An interpretative text for the photographs is authored by two familiar names: Lee Ho Yin and Lynne DiStefano, who are well-known academics and practitioners of heritage conservation in Hong Kong. The text leads readers to a better understanding of the topic and the meaning behind Michael’s photographs of Earth God shrines in urban Hong Kong. The topic of this book is timely, given the vulnerability of traditional beliefs and practices in an increasingly urbanised Hong Kong. It is hoped that Small God, Big City will provoke deeper thoughts on who we are and what we believe in, in this modern world.