Michael Wolf | Paris approaches the city through roofs, chimneys, gutters and façades — the parts of Paris that are seldom asked to carry a picture on their own. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2019, the year of Wolf’s death, the book measures 29 by 24 centimetres and orders its photographs so that the geometry of the skyline gradually gives way to something quieter.

Wolf built his reputation on density: the Hong Kong tower blocks he called beehives, the passengers squeezed behind glass in Tokyo Compression, the factory floors of China, Factory of the World. His training was rigorous in the same way — photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen under Otto Steinert. In Paris he works with that attentiveness at a different scale. Chimneys and rooflines supply rhythm through colour, shape and volume; walls and gutters run across the frame like drawn lines. The photographs give the ordinary weight without dressing it up as monument.

The second half turns intimate. Shadows of trees fall across building façades, and with no human figure anywhere in the picture, vegetation and architecture begin to answer one another. A text by Johan-Frédérik Hel Guedj accompanies the plates; Wolf’s photographs provide the book’s visual continuity.

For collectors, the book offers a focused expression of Wolf’s approach to urban space. Here is a photographer known for metropolises under pressure looking at a European city through the same eye, and asking what an urban environment does to the people inside it — or, in these pages, what it looks like when they are gone. Wolf’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and is held in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt. This volume belongs to that body of work: compact, deliberately sequenced, and clear about what it wants the viewer to notice.