Biography

was an American-German photographer whose images poetically captured time and place. From an homage to the still-life paintings of Francisco de Zubarán to a portrait of a NYPD officer on his beat, Hofer’s eclectic subjects anticipated those of William Eggleston while hearkening back to those of August Sander . “In reality, all we photographers photograph is ourselves in the other—all the time,” she once said. Born on January 21, 1922 in Marburg, Germany, Hofer and her family fled to Geneva, Switzerland in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime. She later attended private photography lessons with Hans Finsler in Zürich, learning not only how to work a camera but the chemistry involved printing. Moving to New York in 1946, the young photographer worked under Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, where she befriended the illustrator Saul Steinberg . During the mid-1950s, Hofer was asked to produce the accompanying photographs for Mary McCarthy’s book The Stones of Florence (1959). Over the decades that followed, she frequently collaborated with writers, travelling to Dublin, London, and Paris to produce images for their literary works. She died on November 2, 2009 in Mexico City, Mexico. Today, Hofer’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, among others.