Hildebrand studied Fine Art Photography at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Madrid under, among others, Elger Esser, Joan Fontcuberta, and Martin Parr. His works have been exhibited internationally and honored with awards such as the European Architectural Photography Prize.

If a narrative impulse is on the ascendency in documentary photography, a group of photographers working in and around Frankfurt seem to have a corner on the trend. Joachim Hildebrand’s earlier work celebrated the encyclopedic cataloguing of endless apartment dwellings in Hong Kong. These accordion-like vistas found a surprising counterpoint in a series of images of tropical fish in storefront tubs, packed like sardines swimming nowhere. The combined typologies, however, indicated no storylines as such.

In his recent work, however, the narrative impulse steps in dramatically, turning up the volume on contemporary photography. Shooting down from shopping mall overpasses, without the graphic intent of the 30’s Bauhaus masters such as Moholy-Nagy and Otto Steinert, Mr. Hildebrand catches streams of crisscrossing populations coming and going from who knows where to who knows where…

–Arno Rafael Minkkinen