(Eberswalde, Germany, 1944)

Candida Höfer is a German photographer based in Cologne and one of the representatives of the so-called Düsseldorf School.

She was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, Brandenburg, the daughter of journalist Werner Höfer.

In 1968, Candida began working for newspapers as a portrait photographer and, from 1970, as an assistant to Werner Bokelberg. She later attended the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts between 1973 and 1982, where she studied film with Ole John and, from 1976, photography as a student of Bernd Becher. Together with Thomas Ruff, she was one of Becher’s first disciples to use color, showing her work in slide projections.

Between 1973 and 1978, Höfer worked on her series Turks in Germany, which reflects the lives of Turkish immigrant workers, although it was in 1979, while studying in Düsseldorf, that she began taking color photographs of the interiors of public buildings such as offices, banks, and waiting rooms. The usual format of her photographs is 38 x 38 cm or 38 x 57 cm.

In recent years, she has devoted herself primarily to architectural and interior photography.

In 2010, she did a project in Spain for the celebration of the Xacobeo year.