By Daryl Lang

German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer, who devoted her six-decade career to orderly and well-constructed portraits and scenic photographs, has died at age 87.

Hofer, who divided her time between New York and Mexico, died November 2 in Mexico City, according to a representative at her gallery, the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

Hofer combined technical precision and a gift of observation to capture the essence of people and places. But her work spoke quietly and called little attention to itself. It was so often overlooked that in 1986 a photo magazine dubbed her “America’s most famous ‘unknown’ photographer.”

Publisher Gerhard Steidl referenced that awkward distinction in 2005, after working with Hofer on her retrospective book Evelyn Hofer. “One could call her ‘the Unknown’—but she belongs amongst the greatest photographers of the twentieth century,” Steidl told PDN in an interview about the book. “To develop her work in a book—in close collaboration with her—was one of the most important discoveries in my working life.”

Hofer was born in Germany in 1922 and moved to Mexico with her family in 1942, then to New York in 1946. She had apprenticed with two photographers in Zurich before attempting a professional career as a fashion photographer.

Fashion, though, did not suit her style. Instead, she found her voice photographing real people and real locations.

Collaborating with writers, Hofer traveled to locations around the world capturing the subtle essence of the places she saw. The resulting books include The Stones of Florence (1959) with Mary McCarthy; London Perceived (1962), New York Proclaimed (1965) and Dublin: A Portrait (1967), all with V.S. Pritchett; The Presence of Spain (1964) with James Morris, and Emerson in Italy (1989) with Evelyn Barish.

While her contemporaries experimented with abstraction, Hofer held steadfast to straightforward compositions. But her pictures, while clear, are not simple.

Her portraits, often shot on cloudy days, show subjects looking lost, sad, or at least ambiguous. One of her most recognized pictures, “Phoenix Park on a Sunday, Dublin, 1966,” shows a lineup of four muddy soccer players on a misty field, smiling with their arms folded. Another shot, “Queensboro Bridge, New York, 1964,” shows a young man sitting on a bike. The picture’s colors—green grass, the man’s red shirt, and a yellow flag on the bike—are muted by cloudy lighting, while a gray steel bridge rises in a monochromatic background.

Hofer herself was reluctant to talk about her work, preferring to let it speak for itself. Asked in 2005 why she had taken a detour into still-life photography, she said, “There is no why. I suppose I like still-lifes.”