Candida Höfer: Libraries

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.This volume contains Hofer''s famously ascetic images of the British Library in London, the Escorial in Spain, the Whitney Museum and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Villa Medici in Rome and the Hamburg University Library, among others. Umberto Eco introduces the collection with a witty reflection on the