German photographer Michael Wolf has spent 14 years documenting our city from near and from far. He tells Patrick Brzeski how his new book project opened unexpected doors.

In his 14 years in this city, German photographer Michael Wolf has been one of our most ardent documentarians of Hong Kong wonders writ large and small. In past photo books and exhibitions, such as Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door, Wolf has captured both the most ephemeral and human-scaled elements of our city’s visual identity – the alluring and oft-unnoticed, back-alley bricolages of detritus left by street workers and vendors as they go about their daily doings – and the monolithic brutalism of much of the city’s residential architecture. Following this macro/micro pattern, Wolf’s latest book, Hong Kong Inside Outside, is presented in two volumes sold as a pair, one composed of close-cropped images portraying the titanic exteriors of Hong Kong’s hive-like residential towers, and the other collecting 100 portraits of individual elderly residents at home in their tiny 100 sq ft housing estate apartments. We caught up with Wolf at his own flat in Sheung Wan to discuss his recent work.

How did this book come about?
I started the architectural series as far back as 2003, but at that time it was called “The Architecture of Density”.

Where did the idea for the 100 interior shots come from?
Well, I’ve exhibited the Architecture of Density series in many places all over the world and I always get questioned at the openings: how do people live in there? What does it look like inside? So I had wanted to do a series of Hong Kong interiors for a long time, but it’s very difficult. People are very private and suspicious, and everywhere there are guards. You can’t just walk into a housing estate and start taking photos. It’s daunting.

How did you make it happen?
I was very lucky that a friend directed me to a social worker who was working in Shek Kip Mei Housing Estate, who was wonderful and willing to help me. It was a good place to work – it’s torn down now – but it was a very compact space. It had 27 different buildings, and she was responsible for four of them, inside of which were 600 units. Because she knew the people she was able to take me in. We knocked on the door of each one and explained what I was doing, and if they said yes, I photographed them and we kept going.

I thought that if I combined the Architecture of Density exteriors with the interior project, they would complement each other very well. If you look at the exteriors from father away, they’re almost like tapestries or Mayan ikat rugs. It’s only when you get up close that you can see laundry, mops, and little gardens hanging out. So you have the more abstract book with the exteriors and then you get very personal and concrete with the book of interiors. It’s such an interesting combination and it fits the overreaching theme of most of my work, which is life in cities.

The colours on some of the building exteriors are incredible.
Yes, and it’s something that you only find in Hong Kong – this totally wacky, cartoonish color scheme. In no other country in the world would you have someone with the balls to say, “Okay, you can paint your housing estate red, yellow, bright green, pink and blue” [Laughs]. When I first came to Hong Kong, I thought it was totally tacky, but I now see that it makes the city much more appealing. If you look at some of the grey monoliths, it’s horrible – I call them suicide houses.

What kinds of responses did you get from the residents, when you asked to photo them and their rooms?
I was very surprised because 80 per cent said yes. And they didn’t say yes, but please come back tomorrow after I’ve cleaned up. They just said yes, go ahead and photograph. So all of these photos are completely authentic and absolutely nothing is arranged. It’s a wonderful document I find, especially now that they are all gone.

Did you see your role towards your subjects as that of a documentarian?
My primary goal was to document the interiors, rather than the people. It’s an interesting speculation to try to figure out what you can deduce about a life from a room and a person’s belongings. So what I did, instead of putting the person very much in the foreground, I always included them as part of the ensemble of the room and I asked them all to be very neutral. I basically wanted them to be almost like a piece of furniture. For me this was more of a sociological experiment, doing an inventory of these 100 rooms. I was interested in what they all have in common, how they use space. These are tiny rooms of 100 square feet and some of these people have lived here for 30 or 40 years. It’s amazing, how do you do it?

Hong Kong Inside Outside is published by Asia One Books/Peperoni Books and is out now.