AXEL HÜTTE

Axel Hütte (b. 1951, Essen, Germany) is known for his nocturnal American cityscapes and landscape photography. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1973 and 1981, where he attended Bernd Becher’s fine art course in photography. Together with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, with whom he shared a studio space in a disused power station, Hütte belongs to a generation of post-war German photographers who, through the influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher, have resurrected the city as a key subject of art photography. Other important subjects include jungles and mountains, as well as classical scenes. Conscious of the nineteenth-century German tradition of romantic landscape painting, Hütte depends upon compositional and structural devices, whilst refuting its tradition of emotional excess and self-conscious pathos.