Robert Lebeck

Robert Lebeck (born March 21, 1929 in Berlin ; † June 14, 2014 there ) was a German photojournalist and important collector of photographs from the 19th century and magazines from the early days of photojournalism.

Robert Lebeck (2011)

life and work

Robert Lebeck was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1944 at the age of 15 and came to the Eastern Front, where he was taken prisoner in 1945. On his return he completed his Abitur at the Fürstenberg-Gymnasium in Donaueschingen and studied ethnology in Zurich and New York , where he became aware of the photo journalism of the magazines Life and Look . Photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt , David Douglas Duncan and W. Eugene Smith became his role models.

He learned photography by himself and from 1952 worked as a photo reporter, initially for various Heidelberg newspapers and later for magazines such as Revue (1955 office manager in Frankfurt), Kristall (1960–1966) and Stern (1966–1977). From 1977 to 1978 he was editor-in-chief of GEO magazine with Klaus Harpprecht . From 1979 he worked again for the star .

In the 1950s Lebeck photographed post-war Germany, starting in 1952 with “ Adenauer at the Rosenfest in Baden-Baden” for the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung , Kriegsheimkehrer (1955), Winston Churchill in Bonn (1956), at the Jazz Festival in Frankfurt and the film festival in Berlin (1956), as well as in the eastern part of the city. In 1958 he was Pope Pius XII at the funeral . in Rome.

Lebeck became famous with his first large foreign report on Africa in the year Zero (1960 for Kristall ). His photo of a young African who stole King Baudouin's sword during the independence celebrations of the Congo went around the world and is still his “calling card” today. After that he was traveling around the world for reports. A first exhibition was dedicated to his photos for the first time in 1962 at the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry . In 1966 he moved to New York for two years for Stern . He was on a campaign trip with Willy Brandt and accompanied him for two years after the 1972 election. In addition to political and social reports, he also portrayed many writers, visual artists, musicians and actors; especially his intimate pictures of Romy Schneider are known.

If he had previously been interested in Art Nouveau and then collected postcards, he built up an important collection on photography from the 19th century, which contains many incunabula from the history of photography and has been part of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 1994 . Lebeck then turned to newspapers and magazines, which he brought together within twelve years to a consistent history of photo reportage based on their publications from 1839 to 1974. "Kiosk" was the name of the first exhibition of this collection in 2001, which was shown in the Cologne Museum Ludwig and then in the Altona Museum Hamburg.

On his 80th birthday, the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau showed the most extensive exhibition of his photos to date.

Robert Lebeck lived in the Médoc in France in the 1990s . Since 2001 he has been living in his native Berlin again. On July 4, 2014, he was buried in the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof II in Berlin.

The extensive Robert Lebeck collection, which includes more than 30,000 exhibits, was bought by the State of Berlin in 2016. Parts of it were on view until the end of January 2017 in the exhibition Kiosk - Collection Robert Lebeck in the German Press Museum in the Ullsteinhaus Berlin.

In the film “ 3 Days in Quiberon ” (2018) Robert Lebeck (played by Charly Hübner ) is the photographer who, together with the Stern reporter Michael Jürgs ( Robert Gwisdek ), did a three-day interview with Romy Schneider ( Marie Bäumer ), in a spa hotel in Quiberon ( Brittany ), which has been housed there for 4 days for detoxification. The German-French-Iranian director Emily Atef was drawn from the interview that actually took place in Quiberon with Lebeck's photographs, which are in the book Romy Schneider. The last pictures of a myth, published in 1986, inspire and create a cinematic monument to it.

Awards

In 1991 he received the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the German Society for Photography . In 2002 he and Bodo von Dewitz received the Annual Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography , New York. In 2007 he was awarded the " Henri Nannen Prize " for his life's work at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg .

Photo books

• Africa in the year zero , Hammerich & Lesser, Berlin 1961.
• Eyewitness , texts by Heinrich Jaenecke and Henri Nannen, Bucher, Munich / Lucerne 1984, ISBN 9783765804465 .
• Romy Schneider. Last Pictures of a Myth , Edition Stemmle, Schaffhausen 1986, ISBN 3-7231-0354-5 .
• Encounters with the great of the time , Edition Stemmle, Schaffhausen 1987, ISBN 978-3-72310-362-3 .
• Photo reports , Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 1994, ISBN 978-3-89322-541-5 .
• Vis à Vis , Steidl, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 978-3-88243-649-5 .
• Outrageous luck , Steidl, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-88243-980-9 .
• Curious about the world. Memories of a photo reporter , autobiography, together with Harald Willenbrock, Steidl, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-86521-184-2 .
• Tokyo - Moscow - Leopoldville , Steidl, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86521-527-7 .
• Gisela Kayser and Cordula Lebeck (eds.): Robert Lebeck. Photographs 1955–2005 , Steidl, Göttingen 2008, 240 p., ISBN 978-3-86521-873-5 , exhibition catalog.
• Abiku , photographs based on poems by Wole Soyinka . MVerlag Thomas Reche, Neumarkt 2012, ISBN 978-3-929566-89-5 , (with Barbara Klemm ).
• Italy, Italy! , Photographs with diary notes by Sándor Márai , Verlag Thomas Reche, Neumarkt 2014.
• World . Gruner + Jahr, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-652-00279-0 .
• Face the Camera , Steidl, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-95829-143-0
• 1968 , Steidl, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3958294448

Books with the Robert Lebeck collections

• Panorama of the Past - The First Thirty Years, 1840–1870 , text by Werner Hofmann, print, Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-923351-00-3 .
• Camera pioneers. The first century of photography 1840–1900. Fotoforum Bremen, Bremen 1987, ISBN 978-39261-1702-1 .
• All truth! All lie! Photography and Reality in the 19th Century , ed. by Bodo von Dewitz and Roland Scotti, Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1997, ISBN 978-9-0570-5024-4 .
• Kiosk. A story of photo reportage , ed. by Bodo von Dewitz, Steidl, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 978-3-88243-791-1 .

Numerous thematic compilations of his postcards have been published by Harenberg in the series Die bibliophilen Taschenbücher .

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions

• 1962: “Tokyo – Moscow – Leopoldville”, Museum of Art and Industry , Hamburg; until 1965 also in Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, Lübeck and Bremerhaven.
• 1983: "Eyewitness Robert Lebeck - 30 Years of Contemporary History", Kiel / Brühl 1990.
• 1991: "Photo reports", Perpignan (FR), Cologne, Frankfurt / M. / Speyer 1993.
• 1991: “Portraits 1956–1991”, Gruner + Jahr Pressehaus, Hamburg.
• 1999: “Vis-à-vis”, Gruner and Jahr Pressehaus, Hamburg; Traveling exhibition through Europe and America.
• 2003 “Portraits”, imago fotokunst, Berlin
• 2004: "Outrageous Luck", Willy Brandt House , Berlin.
• 2008: “Curious about the world”, Bode Gallery & Edition , Nuremberg.
• 2009: “Photographs 1955–2005”, Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin.
• 2009: "Music in the Blood", Bode Gallery & Edition , Nuremberg.
• 2010: "Photographs", Focke Museum , Bremen.
• 2014: “For the 85th birthday”, Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST, Berlin
• 2014: “In die Welt”, Flo Peters Gallery, Hamburg
• 2016: Robert Lebeck - "Face the Camera", Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin
• 2018: “Robert Lebeck. 1968 ”, Wolfsburg Art Museum
• 2018: Robert Lebeck, Vis-à-vis, Photo Bastion Zurich
• 2018: Robert Lebeck Romy in Quiberon , Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST, Berlin
• 2019: "Germany in March", Galerie Freelens, Hamburg
• 2020: “Robert Lebeck. Portraits of People and Countries ”, Art and Culture Center Monschau

Group exhibitions

• 1963: “Africa is building”, German Africa Society, Bonn
• 1972: “Universalists”, together with Mario de Biasi, Jack Garafalo and Don McCullin , Photokina , Cologne.
• 1985: “Photography in German Magazines 1946–1984”, Institute for Foreign Relations Stuttgart (curated by Ute Eskildsen ).
• 1989: "German Photography in the 20th Century", Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn (curated by Klaus Honnef ).
• 1990: “Masters of Light - Fifty Masters of Photography”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (curated by Abe Frajndlich ).
• 1991: “World of Work”, Museum of Work, Norköpping (SWE) (curated by Rune Hassner).
• 1996: “The fixed gaze. Germany and the Rhineland in the focus of photography ”, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn (curated by Klaus Honnef).
• 1996: "The German Eye", Deichtorhallen , Hamburg.
• 1997: "Between Document and Abstraction", collection of the DGPh .
• 1998: "German Photography - Power of a Medium 1870–1970", Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bonn (curated by Klaus Honnef).
• 2012: “Africa, there and back”, photographic collection, Folkwang Museum Essen

Exhibitions of its collections

• 1982: "RL Collection - Photography of the 19th Century", Neue Nationalgalerie , Berlin.
• 1987: “Camera pioneers. The first century of photography 1840–1900. The RL Collection ”, Forum Boettcherstraße, Bremen.
• 1996: “All truth! All lie! Photography and Reality in the 19th Century ”, Agfa Photo Historama in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Museum Ludwig , Cologne.
• 2001: “Kiosk. A History of Photo Reportage ”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Secondary literature

• Jörn Glasenapp : German post-war photography. A story of mentality in pictures. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-7705-4617-6 , pp. 13-22.
• Robert Lebeck. Curious about the world. Black and white icons of a photo legend , in: Highlights-Magazin, issue 3/2008, Nuremberg 2008, pp. 46–52.
• Arnulf Siebeneicker: "I fix what is". Robert Lebeck's photo reports for the star , in: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2004), pp. 111–121.
• Jörn Glasenapp : The sword thief from Léopoldville. Robert Lebeck's key picture of the decolonization of Africa . In: Gerhard Paul (Hrsg.): The century of pictures 1949 until today . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-30012-1 , pp. 242-249

Films about Robert Lebeck

• Faces of Germany - The unknown pictures of the photographer Robert Lebeck. Documentation, Germany, 2009, 5:36 min., Script and direction: Elisabeth Weyer, production: hr , first broadcast: January 4th, 2009
• Eyewitnesses: Thomas Höpker , Robert Lebeck, Stefan Moses . Documentation, Germany, 1998, script and direction: Thomas Schadt , production: BR , arte , broadcast on arte: July 1st, 1998, awarded the Adolf Grimme Prize
• In the spell of the moment - the photographer Robert Lebeck. Documentation, Germany, 2008, 26 min., First broadcast on arte: March 30, 2008, script & director: Jeremy JP Fekete , production: RBB / ARTE , awarded the New York Festival 2009 Film & Video Award, category: Documentaries "Bronze World Medal ", USA, trailer [1] and nominated for the golden rose of Rose d'Or Festival 2009, Switzerland.

supporting documents

1. ↑ Photographer Robert Lebeck died
2. ↑ The title and two double pages of the report are shown in: Mary Panzer: Things as They Are. Photojournalism in Context Since 1955. World Press Photo, Aperture, New York 2005, ISBN 1-59711-014-0 , pp. 80f.
3. ↑ Pictures of a contemporary witness ( memento from June 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), stern.de from June 15, 2014.
4. ↑ Cf. Jörn Glasenapp: Der Degendieb von Léopoldville. Robert Lebeck's key picture of the decolonization of Africa. in: Gerhard Paul (Hrsg.): The century of pictures: 1949 until today. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-30012-1 , pp. 242-249.
5. ↑ On the death of Robert Lebeck: The man who made us witnesses. spiegel.de, June 15, 2014, accessed June 15, 2014.
6. ↑ KIOSK. Robert Lebeck Collection. A history of photo reportage 1839-1973 , dpmu.de, accessed on February 14, 2017.
7. ^ Prokino: 3 days in Quiberon - Official website. Retrieved April 15, 2018 . 
8. ↑ www.newyorkfestivals.com ( Memento of the original dated December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Web links

Commons : Robert Lebeck  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Robert Lebeck's website
• Robert Lebeck. Photographs 1955–2005 - exhibition 2008/09
• Photos by Robert Lebeck
• Exhibition “Robert Lebeck. 1968 "
• Literature by and about Robert Lebeck in the catalog of the German National Library