Artwork Information

Frank Hofmann was an influential photographer, both commercially and artistically, who introduced interwar European modernist ideas and practices to New Zealand. Born in Prague in 1916, Hofmann (who was Jewish) escaped to England after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Christchurch in 1940 where he established himself as a freelance photographer. He ran Christopher Bede Studios, a successes photographic studio, from 1948-1975.

Hofmann's work explores the camera's capacity to express heightened emotions and a contemporary essence, drawing on techniques that were pivotal to the modern photography movements of the 1920s and 1930s. His images frequently employ ambiguity, a lyrical interplay of line, shape, light and shadow, strange angles, and above all a transformation of the ordinary.

Hofmann worked in commercial photography for more forty years and Christopher Bede Studios sees him muse on the role of the photographer who is depicted in the foreground. Standing in shadow, his arms are raised as if conducting the cast of characters like he would an orchestra.