Photographer Evelyn Hofer Dies at 87

After decades of capturing some of the most composed portraits and serene architectural shots, photograph Evelyn Hofer passed away on November 2 after suffering from a stroke in Mexico City. Hofer was known for working with the unlikely tool of a four-by-five-inch viewfinder camera, and also for traveling to her subjects, whom she often shot in a quiet, unchanging setting often in black and white. The photographer once said she searched for an “inside value, some interior respect,” according to The New York Times, in the people she shot. However, because of her studied approach to picture taking, Hofer deviated from the style of her ‘50s and ‘60s candid contemporaries like Robert Frank and was largely undervalued and underappreciated in her home country. Though she never received a museum show in the United States, there was a Swiss retrospective of her work in 1994 and travel writers continuously sought her out for collaborations, bringing her to Florence, London, New York, Dublin and Spain. Despite her lack of universal recognition, art critic Hilton Kramer once deemed Hofer “one of the living masters of her medium.”