Rooms full of expectation

Visual Arts: The buildings in Candida Höfer's photographs are haunted by their occupants, though they are rarely occupied as such. Höfer photographs interior public spaces, locations such as offices, lecture theatres, libraries, archives, reception rooms, store rooms, foyers, museums, galleries, restaurants and canteens, at times when there is no-one there.

Yet, although they are deserted, the rooms, with their various kinds of paraphernalia, seem poised and ready for human intervention, charged with energy of some kind. It is as though the texts in the books densely packed on library shelves are like the charge in a battery.

It's reasonable to say that this idea of potential is at the heart of Höfer's work, and her subject is not so much the rooms themselves as the empty spaces framed by the rooms. While there is an obvious emphasis on organisation and logic in her views of libraries and other functional spaces, she is also drawn to oddities and incongruities, to ad hoc arrangements of things. These seeming eccentricities are always related to simple practicality, such as catering or teaching, and are also a way of articulating the potential inherent in a space. If you think this sounds a bit unlikely, too metaphysical an interpretation of what are, after all, photographs of empty rooms, you should look at Höfer's images for yourself.

You can do so at Imma at the moment, where Candida Höfer: Dublin gathers together 11 of her photographs of places in Dublin, including rooms in Imma itself, the Merrion Hotel, the Long Room in Trinity College and Marsh's Library. The latter two form part of an extensive series of work concentrating on libraries throughout the world. It is collected together in a fascinating book, Libraries (Thames & Hudson £42). This and an earlier, formidable volume, Candida Höfer: A Monograph, (Thames & Hudson, £48) (which incorporates some of her Libraries project) amount to an engrossing retrospective.

Höfer was born in Eberswalde, in Germany, in 1944. Having attended the Cologne Crafts College, she returned to third level studies in 1973, at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. During a long spell there she studied film and then, from 1976 to 1982, photography, with the influential Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers were largely responsible for introducing, or more accurately reintroducing, an objective, taxonomic, documentary approach into the world of art photography. Their own work developed into an extraordinary documentary archive of industrial structures. Several of their former students, including Höfer, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, number among the most prominent art photographers today.

Höfer's student projects were concerned with utilitarian architecture, but viewed from more precisely defined human perspectives. That is, the centre of gravity of the images lay in the stories, political, social and cultural, of the people who inhabited the architectural spaces. One could not really say the same of her subsequent work. Nor, though, is she an architectural photographer per se. Witness the way, more often than not, she concentrates on precisely those aspects of a building that are ignored in conventional architectural photography, because they take away from a purely architectonic view.

Like a great deal of contemporary photography, Höfer's work invites comparison with aspects of painting, though not because she sets out to emulate painterly effects in any way. The photographs on display at Imma, though, are big: they are printed to the scale of paintings.

Moreover, Höfer has a very good sense of light. The lighting in her images is rarely dramatic but usually models forms and imparts a sense of space with something of the solidity of painting. In addition, she uses a large format camera, deep focus, and inclines towards classically poised compositions, all of which mean that we are prompted to approach her images not as snapshots to be absorbed at a glance, but rather as complex, intricately detailed surfaces that must be interpreted piecemeal, as with paintings.

Höfer first came to Dublin in 2004 as part of her Libraries project. She evidently found a great deal of material here and she was obviously delighted with the Long Room in Trinity, the subject of a substantial sequence of photographs. Less predictably, she was also taken with the function rooms of the Merrion Hotel.

It is characteristic of her images that they can seem to offer very little at first glance but, once we have accepted that they are not going to fit in with our preconceptions of what a photograph should show us, they begin to open up. She was allowed access to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, while it was being comprehensively overhauled and extended. There she photographed empty spaces and indeed spaces in the process of construction. One of her images, for example, features the skeletons of two stud walls, trestles stacked with wood and plasterboard, ladders, and a scaffolding tower. Unusually, a couple of people are also included, apparently an electrician and a carpenter.

Getting on with their work, they are, by virtue of the long exposure time, partly blurred presences, small within the scale of the composition. The foreground is dominated by the materials that will eventually define the space, the plasterboard sheets and lengths of two-by-four. It is this moment, one feels, that interests Höfer: when the space is full of possibility, in the process of becoming something. In her almost symmetrical composition, recessive lines converge towards the scaffold tower far back in the room. Perched atop the scaffolding, the electrician's upstretched hand merges with the white glow of an illuminated bulb.

If Höfer went in for titles, which, beyond bare statements of location, she certainly doesn't, this one could be called Let there be light.

Candida Höfer: Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art until Oct 1 01-6129900