portfolio 12

Heinrich Riebesehl. Menschen im Fahrstuhl

Portfolio 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

2/9/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/7/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

6/16/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/11/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

2/22/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/1/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

4/15/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

4/6/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/20/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

6/34/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/4/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

5/6/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

17,3 x 24 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/24/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

1/19/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/28/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

1/13/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/19/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

4/30/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

4/19/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

3/22/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

HEINRICH RIEBESEHL (1938–2010)

6/2/69, 20.11.1969

gelatin silver print

24 x 17,3 cm

© Gallery Kicken Berlin, 2007

 

On November 20, 1969, Heinrich Riebesehl repaired to the publishing headquarters of the Neue Hannoversche Presse at Nr. 10 Goseriede in Hanover. The thirty-one-year-old photographer was still formally a member of the editorial staff but had for the past year or so been struggling to make a living, mainly by teaching; he had taken over Umbo’s post at the Werkkunstschule Hannover (Hanover School of Arts and Crafts). On this particular morning, Riebesehl had special business to conduct in the publishing house. He wanted to take photographs in the elevator, training his more or less hidden camera on the people who came to stand and wait across from him. The set for this narrative was fixed: a small, virtually square room brightened by cold ceiling lights; a small-format camera out-fitted with a wide-angle lens and a wire release. Rumor has it that, faced with his dissolving bond to the publisher, Riebesehl wanted to document his colleagues one more time, and that the series Menschen im Fahrstuhl (People in the Elevator) grew out of this idea. He had, moreover, already discussed the work of Walker Evans with a close circle of colleagues, particularly the American’s project of using a concealed camera to photograph passengers on the New York City subway between 1938 and 1941. (Joachim Giesel, one of Heinrich Riebesehl’s long-time colleagues, in conversation with the author, July 2008.) It was the first time in the history of the medium that a photographer had conceptually abandoned control over the image.
It is – in many senses of the word – much narrower in the elevator of a six-story building in the middle of a north-German city of around half a million people, where the mindset of Protestant officialdom is palpable everywhere.
Riebesehl had already lived in Hanover for some time. He had come, via detours, from Essen, where he had studied in the photography department with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang Schule für Gestaltung (Folkwang School of Design). He and fellow students had made the rounds of the happenings and art festivals taking place during those years. In Aachen in 1964 he managed to take the spectacular photograph of a bloodied Joseph Beuys raising a crucifix. A quarrel with his teacher grew out of Riebesehl’s stubborn interest in steam engines, and it was only after an eight-year interruption that he completed his studies, albeit with distinction, in 1973. In addition to his journalistic activities, between 1967 and 1969 Riebesehl worked on a series of portraits, inviting artist friends as well as passersby to sit for him. The teaching of Otto Steinert is still discernable in the strict formalization of emotional aspects and in the dark margins of these images. More than three decades after the end of the Third Reich, skepticism toward human physicality was, it seems, reason enough to commit to a pictorial grammar dominated by a distancing set of rules. During this time Riebesehl worked at the Institut für wissenschaftliche Fotografie (Institute for Scientific Photography) in Stuttgart and engaged in various other short-term projects. He had his first solo exhibitions and participated in group shows, at the George Eastman House in Rochester, among others.
The Menschen im Fahrstuhl series opens up formal compression in an astonishing way, exploiting a strict system of rules as a framework for releasing the conditioning of Being. Formal elements such as distortion, strong diagonals, and sculpturally argueing light now draw their meaning – their justification – from the place and the context: here is this narrow little room in vibrating, vertical movement. It circulates employees and visitors from the basement to the archives, via editorial, marketing, and administration The situation is Kafkaesque per se. You can ignore each other. You can turn away or to the side. You can withdraw into your own personal space. But no matter how you behave, you cannot exit this little box with its sallow light until the next time it jerks to a halt and the doors open. It is not unusual to come across a man with a camera in the elevator of a newspaper building. All the same, this was an experimental setting. Just two months later, when the photographer presented his work to the public for the first time at the city’s storied Kunstverein (Art Association) he titled it “Five Hours and 35 Minutes with a Camera in the Elevator of a Publishing House, November 20, 1969, 10:35 to 12:30 and 13:30 to 17:10.” – a name that clearly owed much to his experience of performances and happenings. A short time later he would abandon this in favor of Menschen im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969. Even if you don’t know every-thing about the context here – be it the number of floors in the building at Nr. 10 Goseriede or the party initials scratched into the elevator’s walls as seen in the pictures – Menschen im Fahrstuhl is a sober, highly detailed study of compressed everyday life of employees within the Federal Republic of Germany.
Two years later, in the summer of 1971, Riebesehl went a step further, inviting the attendees of a youth event at the same publishing house to take portraits of themselves. He left them alone with a camera, an auto-timer and a mirror next to the equipment. Each subject was allowed a single exposure. The photographer himself withdrew to the role of setting things up and defining and producing the enlargements.
A few years after that, Heinrich Riebesehl embarked on his major project as a photographic surveyor, describing in photographs with the poetry of a precisely distanced lover the flat landscape surrounding the city of Hanover, its uses and its buildings. The images in the series Agrarlandschaften (Agricultural Landscapes, 1976-1979) would later serve as the main basis for his fame. It is the fame of a photographer able to find permanently relevant images for the world and its condition within a limited territory.
Incidentally, on November 20, 1969 and the days that followed, the newspapers – as well as the two German television channels then in existence – were dominated by an upward journey of a completely different nature; Apollo 12 had landed. As the Neue Hannoversche Presse reported, it was the first time that a man had sung on the moon. The intention had been to broadcast live from the moon, but the technology was not up to the task; footage from Nasa’s training rooms had served as a substitute. The simultaneity of these events was apparently a coincidence. Heinrich Riebesehl never referred to Apollo 12 in his statements about Menschen in Fahrstuhl. And yet, he would not have been past seeing a parallel between his own action, set in an elevator in the flatlands, and the event of world history being made up there on November 20, 1969. (Text by Inka Schube)

This portfolio contains 21 original photographs. It is published in a limitd edition of 15 and five artist’s proofs in Roman numerals. The photographs are gelatin silver prints on Afga Multicontrast Classic fibre-based paper (ca. 183g) 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.