Award-winning photographer Michael Wolf is dead. He died sleeping in his adopted hometown of Hong Kong on Wednesday, gallery owner Sarah Greene said, who had worked with Wolf. Nothing is known about the cause of death.

Wolf was born in Munich in 1954, but grew up in Canada, Europe and the United States. He first studied at Berkeley University in California before returning to his native land and studying photography at the Folkwang School with Otto Steinert.

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Michael Wolf in front of pictures of the series "Toyko Compression"

With his final thesis at the Folkwang School, a social reportage about the Ruhr city of Bottrop, Wolf caused a stir. In 1994 he moved to Hong Kong as a permanent photographer for the "Stern", where he made some of his most famous shots: Under the slogan "Megacities" he found impressive images of urban densification, first in Hong Kong, then in cities like Paris or Tokyo.

From the Japanese giant city comes the famous photo series "Tokyo Compression", which showed people in the crowded subways of the city and for which Wolf was awarded the World Press Award. Wolf has published over a dozen photo books, as well as exhibiting in museums worldwide. It was not until the winter of 2018 that his large exhibition "Life in Cities" was shown in the Haus der Fotografie in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen.

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Michael Wolf: Man and structure in view

"Hong Kong was his favorite city," said Greene, who worked with Wolf on exhibitions and book projects from 2013 to 2018. "The city has always inspired him, he zoomed out of the beehive in his iconic series 'Architecture of Density' and zoomed into the veins of the city, exploring the peculiar beauty of the side streets."

At the Deutschlandfunk, Wolf once explained his enthusiasm for China: "In English, I call this always 'unpredictable', that unpredictability you experience in China, where you really do not know when I go around that corner, what awaits me there This can be a huge hole where a horse drowns or that can be a tank, it all happened already. "