Heinrich Riebesehl

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Heinrich Riebesehl (* 9. January 1938 in Lathen on the Ems , † 31 October 2010 in Hannover ) was a German photographer of the postwar era and university teachers .

Riebesehl exhibition in the Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2004

Childhood and early years

Heinrich Riebesehl was born as the son of the stone setter and sergeant Heinrich Riebesehl and his wife Hilda, née Drewes. He first attended elementary school and then the middle school in Lathen , which he graduated in 1955 with the secondary school leaving certificate. During his school days, on the advice of the school principal W. Brinkmann, he began to take pictures of his immediate surroundings with an Agfa Silette miniature camera.

Work as a drugstore and first occupation with photography

Heinrich Riebesehl completed an apprenticeship as a druggist in Lathen in 1958 . As part of his work in the drugstore's photo studio and laboratory, he dealt intensively with photography and made contact with amateur photography associations in Hanover. He shot an advertising film for the Christian Association of Young Men , to which he temporarily belonged, as well as an educational film for the shoemaker's college in Hanover on 16 mm. In 1958, the Drogisten-Fachblatt printed photographic works by Riebesehl. In 1963 he published a color photograph in the photo magazine Klick . After completing his training, Riebesehl moved to Hanover , where he worked as a photo specialist in a photo shop until 1963. In addition, he was responsible for the professional photo training of the apprentices. In July 1958 he met his future wife, the chemist Gisela Katharina Remane, whom he married on August 21, 1964.

Studied with Otto Steinert

In April 1963, with financial support from Gisela Remane, Riebesehl began studying with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen in the photography group. In 1965 he left the Folkwang School after a conflict with Otto Steinert, but resumed his studies in October 1972 after he was accepted into the final semester on Steinert's advice. In January 1973 Riebesehl graduated with an overall grade of "very good". As a practical thesis, he submitted photographs from the series Locomotives , Sabine , People in the Elevator and self- portraits , among other things . Riebesehl wrote his theoretical work on the subject of photographic memories .

Photographic work

During his studies, Heinrich Riebesehl photographed reports abroad about an antique dealer in Amsterdam and a cemetery in England. Further work was done in the basic semester on the topics of the open house , the armed forces and the school sports festival . He began working on the Locomotives series in 1963 , which he finished in 1965.

Work as a photo journalist

As early as the mid-1950s, Riebesehl was working as a freelance reporter for the Emsland Nachrichten, a local edition of the Westfälische Nachrichten , which published around thirty photographs and short texts by him between 1956 and 1957. Between 1967 and 1968 Heinrich Riebesehl replaced Joachim Giesel as a photo journalist for the Hanover Press , for which he continued to work as a freelancer after 1968.

Happenings

In July 1964, Riebesehl photographed the Festival of New Art at the Technical University of Aachen , in which Wolf Vostell , Robert Filliou and Joseph Beuys participated, and documented the beginnings of the Fluxus movement in Germany in the years that followed . There were recordings of actions and happenings , including the phenomena initiated by Wolf Vostell , dé-coll / age happening in Berlin and the action 24 hours in the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal, in which Bazon Brock , Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik also took part. Riebesehl's photographs of the happenings are among the best-known images of the early Fluxus movement today, especially the portrait of Joseph Beuys that was created during the Festival of New Art , which shows him with a crucifix and bleeding nose after he was hit in the face by a student .

Portrait photography

Starting out from his photo journalistic activities, Riebesehl concentrated on portrait photography from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. The series Faces was created between 1967 and 1969 , for which he photographed friends and strangers against a neutral background. In later works, such as the series People in the Elevator from 1969, Riebesehl moved away from the staged portrait and pursued a more conceptual approach in which, as a photographer, he increasingly withdrew from the process of creating the image. This was also reflected in the increasing objectification of the picture titles. While Riebesehl named the works from faces after the name or occupation of the person portrayed, the series People in the Elevator and Self- Portraits are only numbered consecutively and given a date. For people in the elevator , Riebesehl photographed employees in the building of the Hanover press with a 35mm camera, which he released with a hidden remote release. The self-portrayals series from 1971 shows portraits of the participants at an event organized by the Neue Hannoversche Presse pop club, who were asked by Riebesehl to use a self-timer to photograph themselves in a room specially set up for this purpose.

Situations and objects

The work Situations and Objects brings together individual images created between 1973 and 1977 that Riebesehl photographed in Germany, Japan and Scotland , and which can be stylistically assigned to Magical Realism and the subjective photography influenced by Otto Steinert . Situations and Objects is an attempt to make visible the element of the magical, the unreal that is inherent in seemingly everyday situations or ordinary objects. Riebesehl worked with hard contrasts and unusual perspectives in order to isolate the objects or people from their surroundings and, contrary to the usual viewing habits, to locate them in a new context. Here, too, as in the conceptual portrait photographs, the images are numbered consecutively instead of image titles.

Agricultural landscapes

The subjective approach that Riebesehl pursues in situations and objects gives way to working in the documentary style in the series Agricultural Landscapes from 1976 to 1979 . The photographs show a sober, factual picture of northern German landscapes, mostly deserted and distant. By choosing a wide-angled image section and as neutral a light as possible and by avoiding technical manipulations, Riebesehl pursues the goal of creating "the simplest possible picture that the viewer can easily understand" (quote from Riebesehl).

While Riebesehl was initially still taking photos with a 35mm camera, he switched to medium format for agricultural landscapes and, in the subsequent series, finally to large format (plate camera). On the one hand, this technology made it possible to produce detailed, large-format prints with many gradations between black and white, and on the other hand, due to the size and weight of the camera and the resulting need to work with a tripod and slow shutter speeds, a certain statics and distance in the pictures. The spontaneity of situations and objects gives way to a slower, well-considered way of working in agricultural landscapes .

Based on the documentary imagery developed in agricultural landscapes , further series of northern German cultural landscapes were created in the 1970s , including commercial buildings , port facilities and railroad landscapes . Taken together, these represent an attempt at a topographical recording of the northern German landscape and its changes in the course of increasing industrialization . Riebesehl worked on this complex of works until the beginning of 2000, which he completed in 2001 with the series Dorfansichten , for which he first photographed in color. For agricultural landscapes , Heinrich Riebesehl was the first photographer to receive the Bernhard Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts in 1981 .

Teaching

From 1968 Heinrich Riebesehl taught photography in the applied graphics department at the Werkkunstschule Hannover (since 1971 Fachhochschule Hannover ), where he also met Otto Umbehr (Umbo), who also taught there until 1971. In 1984 Riebesehl was appointed professor for artistic conception with technical media (photography, film, video) and on May 8, 1995 professor for artistic photography in the department of art and design at the University of Applied Sciences in Hanover, where he taught until 1997. In 2013, 16 former Riebesehl students organized an exhibition dedicated to Heinrich Riebesehl.

Curatorial activity

As part of his employment at the Käthe Schröder publishing house in Hanover as a photographer and clerk, which he held from 1966, Heinrich Riebesehl also worked for the Clarissa gallery affiliated with the publisher. The focus of the gallery, which opened in April 1966 as the first commercial photo gallery in Germany, was on the collection of experimental photography and early computer art from the 1960s. In 1969 Riebesehl began to work as a curator for photo exhibitions for the first time and organized the exhibition 10 photographers in Hanover in the municipal gallery Kubus . For the Kunstverein Hannover , on whose advisory board Riebesehl was a member between 1975 and 1977, he curated the exhibition Photographed Memory , which opened in November 1976 and based on the topic of his theoretical thesis with Otto Steinert .

Spectrum photo gallery

The Spectrum Photo Gallery was born from the idea of ​​being able to present a broad 'spectrum' of photographic work, from experimental photography to photo journalism, to the public. Heinrich Riebesehl opened the gallery as the first chairman on April 6, 1972 together with Karin Blüher, Wolfgang Borges, Peter Gauditz, Joachim Giesel and other photographers from Hanover with an exhibition about Hein Gorny . A total of 88 photo exhibitions were shown.

The status of photography as an art form was still controversial in Germany in the 1970s, unlike in the USA, where it had been an integral part of museums and collections since the 1930s. At documenta 6 in 1977, photography was the focus for the first time, and in the larger German museums, such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (1977) and the Museum Folkwang in Essen (1978), their own photography departments were gradually established at the end of the 1970s set up. In the course of this development, the Spectrum Gallery was integrated into the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 1979 , where it presented photography exhibitions in the early 1990s until the photography and media department was established under the direction of Thomas Weski (Inka Schube since 2001).

The focus of the exhibition was on retrospective exhibitions by representatives of the European avant-garde, such as Umbo , Aenne Biermann and Albert Renger-Patzsch , on contemporary American photography, including Lee Friedlander , William Eggleston , Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore . Works by Joachim Brohm , André Gelpke , Ralph Gibson , John Gossage , Paul Graham , Volker Heinze , Werner Mantz , Nicholas Nixon, Timm Rautert , Man Ray , Michael Schmidt , Wilhelm Schürmann, Otto Steinert and others were also exhibited.

On the occasion of the award of the Bernhard Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts to Heinrich Riebesehl, a solo exhibition in the Spectrum Gallery was dedicated to him in 1982.

In old age Riebesehl fell ill with Parkinson's disease .

Works

  • 1963–65 locomotives
  • 1964–65 happenings
  • 1967–69 faces
  • 1969 people in the elevator
  • 1971 self-portraits
  • 1973–77 situations and objects
  • 1976–79 agricultural landscapes
  • 1978–79 houses and streets
  • 1979–81 industrial landscapes
  • 1979–83 commercial buildings
  • 1979–85 port facilities
  • 1979–97 Railway Landscapes
  • 1983 Meldorf (Dithmarschen)
  • 1992 landscapes
  • 1998–2001 village views

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1970 5 hours and 35 minutes with the camera in the elevator of a publishing house. November 20, 1969, 10:35 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. , 1:30 p.m. to 5:10 p.m. , Kunstverein Hannover
  • 1977 Contemporary Photographs , Sander Gallery, Washington DC
  • 1980 North German agricultural landscapes , Kunsthalle Bremen
  • 1980 Heinrich Riebesehl: Photographs of the Seventies , Galerie Rudolf Kicken, Cologne
  • 1982 Photographs , Spectrum Photo Gallery in the Art Museum Hannover with the Sprengel Collection
  • 1984 Photographs , Museum for Photography Braunschweig
  • 1992 North German Landscapes , Sprengel Museum Hannover
  • 1997 Railway landscapes. Photographs from 1981 to 1997 , Sprengel Museum Hannover
  • 1998 photographs , Kunstverein Lüneburg
  • 2004 Photographic series 1964-2001 , Sprengel Museum Hannover

Awards

Publications

  • Agricultural landscapes. Text by Peter Sager. Bremen 1979.
  • Agricultural landscapes. Adult new edition. Cologne 2002.

literature

  • Jörg Krichbaum : Heinrich Riebesehl. Situations and objects. A monograph. Riesweiler 1978
  • Rudolf Jüdes: Heinrich Riebesehl. Hanover 1986
  • Thomas Weski: Heinrich Riebesehl. Railway landscapes. Hanover 1997
  • Ulrike Schneider (Ed.): Heinrich Riebesehl. Photographic series 1963–2001. Ostfildern 2004

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Janssen: The land surveyor. The photographer Heinrich Riebesehl died at the age of 72. , in: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of November 2, 2010, p. 7, online on November 1, 2010
  2. ↑ Ulrike Schneider and Thomas Weski: Spectrum Photo Gallery 1972-1991. A review. Selected photographs. Hanover 1995
  3. ↑ Johanna Di Blasi: Riebesehl gives the north a face , in: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of December 8, 2009, page 5
personal data
SURNAME Riebesehl, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer of the post-war period
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Lathen
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 2010
Place of death Hanover