The Cologne-based photographer Candida Höfer has been awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2024.

With this prize, the Akademie der Künste honours one of the most internationally recognized German photographers. Candida Höfer’s oeuvre, which has grown steadily over five decades, is considered part of the contemporary photographic avant-garde. Her large-format photographs depict the public and semi-public spaces of landmark historical libraries, museums and opera houses. The focus of her motifs is on places of human interaction, communication, memory and knowledge, but also of leisure and recreation. The artist herself describes her works not as architectural photography, but rather as portraits of spaces.

The jury, consisting of Akademie members Karin Sander, Hito Steyerl and Siegfried Zielinski, were convinced by Candida Höfer’s longstanding dedication to photography and her ability, through her images, to draw our gaze to the cultural spaces that surround us, thus fostering our appreciation of those spaces. “With her precision of image focus and detail, Candida Höfer gives the spaces a significant, almost spiritual quality, which is reinforced by the presence of the people who are absent”, explains Karin Sander, jury member and director of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.