Trained in photography in Mannheim, Werner Wolff found work as a lab technician in the darkroom at the photo agency PIX and enrolled in classes at the New York Institute for Photography. In 1938, he partnered with Walter Brockmann and other colleagues at PIX to open his own photo agency. Camera Features was located at 114 West 16th Street (later at 31 West 56th Street). In his autobiography, Werner Wolff wrote that the agency “was only moderately successful financially but gave [him] a start with some of the major magazines such as Life, Time, Mademoiselle” (Werner Wolff Archive, AG02.2009.0297:211a/b).

Through Camera Features, a photo series on the voice training of Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt was published in Life magazine (13 March, 1939). Wolff's natural and informal photographs portray the First Lady during her lessons in the New York studio of her teacher Elisabeth von Hesse, who was employed at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (Life, 13 March, 1939, pp. 6-9). Correspondence from the Werner Wolff archives shows that he photographed Roosevelt for Camera Features on several more occasions over the years.

In the 13 March issue of Life, Wolff also appeared under the category of “Life’s Pictures”, which featured a different Life photographer in each issue. The featured portrait of Wolff was shot by the émigré photographer Otto F. Hess and shows Wolff handling a miniature camera. Germany played an important role in the development of the 35mm camera in the 1920s. The camera's small size and weight made it easy to carry around and use – a technical boon for photojournalists and amateur photographers alike. Also the émigré photographer Lotte Jacobi made a portrait of him.

By 1944, Wolff was working as a correspondent for the US Army Signal Corps, where he was then hired as photographer and photography editor for Yank, the Army weekly magazine. While stationed in Italy, he documented for Yank the battles on the River Po and photographed Rome, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Verona, Siena and Venice. With the defeat of Germany, Wolff was one of the first to photograph Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He also experienced the destructive consequences of war at a more personal level when his home town of Mannheim, where he was staying at the time, was reduced to ruins. His huge range of photographs and a collection of Yank magazines are today archived at the Ryerson Image Center.

In 1943, Wolff was naturalised as a US citizen and in 1945 returned to New York from military service. In the same year, he moved with his wife Alice Eckstein (whom he married in 1941) to Bleecker Street, where he was to live for the rest of his life. He also embarked at the same time on his long career as a photojournalist with the Black Star Agency. Howard Chapnick, who was head of Black Star from 1963 to 1990, rated Werner Wolff as an excellent technical photographer who could adapt to all kind of assignments. In his book Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism, Chapnick listed him among the twenty-nine photographers who had left a lasting mark on the agency and had been particularly valued as photojournalists. “His camera was a communicative tool that spoke directly to the viewer without nuance and ambiguity.” (Chapnick 1994, 161) Wolff's New York assignments ranged from reportages on the internment camp on Ellis Island (1949) to the placement of the television antenna on the Empire State Building (1946), for which he was hoisted in a bosuns’s chair to capture the spectacular views of the tower and the city below. For some of his reportage he personally authored the text and selected from his contact sheets the images he wanted used. In addition to his photojournalistic reportages, Wolff was also skilled at portraits and produced a series of photographs of politicians while accompanying Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy on overseas tours. Wolff was also responsible for one of the rare photographs of Kurt Safranski, one of the founders of Black Star, taken during a class at the New School for Social Research in the 1950s.

After his death in 2002, Wolff's photographs passed into the care of his family, who donated them intact, along with archival material (contact sheets, negatives, photographs, publication information, correspondence, epherma) to the Ryerson Image Center, where the Black Star Photographic Collection is kept. The work of this eminent photojournalist can now be enjoyed by the general public.