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German photographer Michael Wolf is perhaps best known for his preoccupation with scale. With a cool, methodical, formalist vision in the vein of compatriots and fellow imagemakers Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer, he has, in his most widely recognized photographs, depicted what he calls the "architecture of density" in Hong Kong, the city he has called home for the past 14 years. Some of this work formed part of his excellent 2005 book Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door, which focused on the surreal traces of city dwellers in eerily depopulated urban frames. It is a subject to which he now returns in the two-volume, slipcase-bound Hong Kong Inside Outside.

These two complementary and beautifully produced books belong to Wolf's larger, long-term project of documenting his adopted city. The slimmer volume, Outside, brings together his depictions of Hong Kong's hulking, close-packed apartment complexes, seen as megaliths and reduced to hard graphic planes. In page after page of images framed to reveal neither sky nor street, the viewer perceives not Hong Kong's iconic skyline but only dizzyingly repetitive patterns of verticals, both impressive and oppressive in their tyrannical two-dimensionality.

It is only natural to want to glimpse the lives behind those concrete façades. Wolf addresses this in the companion volume Inside, subtitled OneHundred by OneHundred, which hones in on Shek Kip Mei Estate, Hong Kong's oldest public-housing complex. With the help of a social worker, in April 2007 Wolf gained access to 100 residents of the estate's soon-to-be-demolished Mark I blocks — accommodation of 1950s vintage designed to house the greatest number of people and to be built in the quickest possible time in response to a burgeoning city's housing crisis. He then photographed the tenants inside their cramped, 120-sq.-ft. (11 sq m)homes (according to an essay at the back of the book, Wolf describes them in his project's title as being 100 sq. ft. simply because it sounds more "poetic"). Shot over the course of four days, these documentary portraits chronicle the quirks and particularities of the estate's mainly elderly residents, and their personal effects — from wall calendars and bunk beds to rice cookers and TV sets — lend themselves to being pored over at length.

Wolf's Inside is not the first book to contain such images. In 2007 Hong Kong photojournalist Vincent Yu published Our Home, Shek Kip Mei 1954-2006 — a work that included a collection of formal portraits of estate residents in their cramped dwellings, albeit in black and white. It is hard to see what, if anything, Wolf does differently. His images are not the result of an intimate rapport between photographer and subject, but of an almost unbridgeable distance: the sitters are showing their best face to a foreign visitor, with many of them smiling for the camera. The result is an odd, strangely uncomfortable dynamic, but one, in the end, that both defines and underlines Wolf's work.

• Lara Day
• Hong Kong's vertical habitations are the subject of Michael Wolf's studied and stylized vision