portfolio 11

Heinrich Riebesehl
10 Photographs 1967–1982

Portfolio 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Uwe', from the series 'Gesichter' (1967-1969), 13.6.1967

gelatin silver print

30,5 x 33,9 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'3/1/69', from the series 'Menschen im Fahrstuhl' (20.11.1969), 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

13,1 x 19,8 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'394/76', from the series 'Situationen und Objekte' (1973-1977), 1976

gelatin silver print

29 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'420/77', from the series 'Situationen und Objekte' (1973-1977), 1977

gelatin silver print

22,8 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Klein Waabs (Schleswig-Flensburg)', from the series 'Agrarlandschaften' (1976-1979), July 1978

gelatin silver print

22,8 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Ronnenberg (Hannover)', from the series 'Agrarlandschaften' (1976-1979), November 1978

gelatin silver print

22,8 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Schillerslage (Hannover)', from the series 'Agrarlandschaften' (1976-1979), October 1978

gelatin silver print

22,8 x 35,8 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Heinum (Hildesheim)', from the series 'Agrarlandschaften' (1976-1979), November 1978

gelatin silver print

22,7 x 35,8 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Jeddingen (Verden)', from the series 'Gewerbebauten' (1976-1979), November 1981

gelatin silver print

22,8 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

'Diekmannshausen (Wesermarsch)', from the series 'Gewerbebauten' (1976-1979), February 1982

gelatin silver print

25,7 x 35,7 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2005

 

Heinrich Riebesehl’s first series clearly exhibit an intent to create photographs of reality that go beyond the seemingly illustrative and visibly perceptible towards an individual concept of reality. Riebesehl achieves this with unusual camera perspectives and by choosing the ‘wrong’ moments of a situation. In these pictures, the blue sky is transformed by technical means into a deep black, giving the white clouds a surrealistic effect. These very puzzling images, made in the 1960’s and 1970’s, cannot be hastily Riebesehl referred to his method as “Bilder mit den Dingen machen” - making images out of things. Allowing the objects in his compositions to become more than meets the eye, to endow them with new levels of meaning and to prevent a quick “who, what, where, why, how?” from dominating the essence of the work. Riebesehl jokingly attributes this clairvoyance to his Northern German background.
Born in Lathen on the Ems river in 1938, Riebesehl, having first apprenticed as a druggist, completed a degree in photography under Otto Steinert at the Folkwangschule in Essen. Because his teacher felt that Riebesehl’s documentation of the rapidly disappearing steam locomotive, although pictorially driven, was excessive to the point of excluding everything else, Riebesehl was expelled from the school. Employment as a gallery assistant, sales clerk at a photography supply store, and as a photojournalist in his new city of residence, Hanover, followed. While working as a newspaper photographer, he also worked extensively on personal projects. In the late 1960’s, for example, he did a series about the people who used the elevators in the newspaper’s publishing house. Photographers were a common site in that editorial atmosphere and not a single elevator passenger noticed the young man with a camera. No one seemed to notice that they were being secretly photographed. Riebesehl had broken the unspoken code of conduct between model and photographer. Nothing was posed and everything was left to chance: who walked in, where the passenger positioned himself, how the passenger dealt with the close confines in the elevator. Along with psychological elements, the resulting photographs also tell us a great deal about major changes in the workplace and how things were at that time.
In the early 1970’s, after completing an external degree at the Folkswangschule, Riebesehl began to concentrate on his own artistic work. Furthermore, he was also a co-founder and driving force behind the first non-commercial photography gallery in Germany, the Spectrum Gallery, which eventually was integrated into the Hanover Sprengel Museum in 1979. He was the successor to Bauhaus master Umbo at the local polytechnical college, teaching there as a professor for art photography from the mid-1980’s until he retired after receiving his professor emeritus title. Towards the end of the 1970’s, Riebesehl issued two monographs within the span of a year that wrote photographic history. With “Situationen und Objekte” (Situations and Objects) Riebesehl, who received numerous honors during his career, presented evocatively charged works created in a ten-year time period during which he continued in the tradition of the “subjektive Fotografie” (Subjective Photography) of his teacher Otto Steinert. With “Agrarlandschaften” (Agrarian Landscapes), the second monograph, he made a radical turnaround back to documentary style art photography. Acting on a maxim of reporting “about things”, Riebesehl dedicated himself to the precise rendering of the cultivated landscapes of Northern Germany.
In these thoroughly valid single images, the recurring horizon line has the accumulative effect of flattening the panorama in this coarse, austere, almost bland agricultural landscape. The photographs are sharp, explicit, and present the objects and their interrelationships under a sky that is invariably neutral gray. These photographs could as well be the laconic documents of a land surveyor. And yet the photographer uses the aesthetic means at his disposal to penetrate so deeply into his subjects that after having laid them bare, so to speak, their true essence can unfold on its own accord. At the same time, Riebesehl, in authoring these images, formulates his own distinctive signature. With his “Gewerbebauten” (commercial buildings) or the “Bahnlandshaften” (railway landscapes), Riebesehl later added common and yet overlooked aspects of the Northern German landscape to his complex oeuvre, creating a new type of “Heimatfotografie” (indigenous landscape photography). Riebesehl received the ultimate praise in this context from a farmer, who commented on a photograph of his field with: “What’s so special about this then? The field looks like this everyday!”
Only pictures taken by the most original photographers have the power to colonize our subconscious. The knowledge their imagery imparts and the fact that their concept of the world diverges from our own allows us to see reality in a new way. This space that forms between these two concepts of reality is free to be filled with our own associations, so that their images become our own. Heinrich Riebesehl undoubtedly is one of the great photographers of our time: no cows in the meadows, no factories with towering smokestacks, no depot building at a railway station which doesn’t immediately call to mind “Riebesehl”. (Text by Thomas Weski)

The portfolio contains 10 original photographs. It is published in a limited edition of 35 and five artist’s proofs in Roman numerals. The photographs are gelatin silver prints on Agfa Multicontrast Classic fibre-based paper (ca. 183 gr/m2) printed by Jochen Rohner under the supervision of Heinrich Riebesehl. The photographs are stamped and numbered. The portfolio is signed and authorized by the artist.