German photographer Candida Hofer was born in 1944 in the town of Eberswalde in Eastern Germany, near the Polish border. She is a graduate of the Kolner Werkschulen, the Cologne Academy of Fine and Applied Arts. From there, she refined her craft with Bernd and Hilla Becher, award-winning photographers, who also guided her illustrious peers, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. Following graduation in 1968, she captured portraits for newspapers and magazines, including a series on Liverpudlian poets in the late 1960s.
Candida Hofer also is known for her colour pictures of public places, showing the empty rooms inside places that are usually hives of activity, such as offices and banks. The Konrad Fischer Galerie gave Hofer her first exhibition of note in 1975. Since then, her works have been shown at a host of prominent museums, including: the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, the Biobliotheque Nationale de France and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York City.
