Hofer, Candida and Umberto Eco — Candida Hofer: Libraries

Munchen, Schirmer/Mosel, 2005. Hardcover. White and color-illustrated DJ with black and white lettering; light grey boards with blue lettering; 271 pp.; chiefly color illustrations. Nobody photographs libraries, those splendid and intimate cathedrals of knowledge, as beautifully as Candida Hofer. Her photographs are sober and restrained in feel -- the atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users, especially as she forgoes any staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance by a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality that gives voice to the objects, over and above the eloquence of the furnishings or the pathos of the architecture. -- DJ. VG (Ex art library with sticker on DJ spine and rear pastedown; DJ is lightly edgeworn/scuffed/smudged; boards are lightly smudged; textblock edges are lightly smudged; interior is very clean, but with light toning at the periphery; binding is solid.) .