How I first got to know Leonore Mau? I was in the Caribbean at the time and got to know this priestess from the Spiritual Baptist Church. She then invited me to the church. The priest had been preaching to the congregation and then added, “As everyone knows, we once had guests here from Germany before, Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau.” He took the two books Xango and Petersilie out from below the altar and we all perused them together. He then gave me presents to pass on to Hubert Fichte. Two years later we returned with the presents for Hubert Fichte. I called Leonore Mau, but she fobbed us off. That was precisely the time when Hubert Fichte was dying.

I wouldn’t have pursued this any further, but our sound technician insisted. At some point, the two of us were invited to dinner at Leonore’s. At that time, Leonore was already over sixty, yet she had stayed very young. She was very elegant and mindful of social graces, but she wasn’t haughty. I found talking to her extremely engaging. She was a generous woman. Her generosity also had something to do with education. In the sense of the word “polyglot”, that you are connected with the entire world through your education, your background and your self-awareness, and for this reason you have no need to be petty.

We didn’t talk much about theory. Instead, Leonore Mau told more graphic accounts about how one or another photo came about, about how she came to participate in a certain ceremony and how poor the light was there, or how someone had stolen her camera.

Her stories were about Hubert Fichte, about the people there and about their amazing experiences. Basically, about the poetic nature of this otherness, this unexpectedness and also about the beauty of the people there.

Leonore’s photos are colourful. Yes, she shot in black and white, yet I believe colour actually played an important role for her, the warm colours she always worked with. In fact, her pictures have something epic about them. Effectively, they are not snapshots. They don’t just say something about a single moment but also about something that recurs. If an animal is sacrificed in a ceremony and you see the blood seeping from it, you don’t think, “There’s an animal being slaughtered”. Instead, you know you are looking at an image of an event that is ritually staged over and over again. Something epic, or even classical. She and Hubert Fichte researched these ceremonies: they’re weren’t just there for an evening but went back repeatedly. Also, the people play less of a role as individuals than as protagonists of their professions or their history. When I say, for instance, that these old ladies from the Casa das Minas are “protagonists of their history” I mean that there is also a resonance of the fact that their ancestors arrived there as slaves. All this history spawns the epic dimension of these images.

Leonore Mau did not stage her photographs. She knew exactly what mattered in these ceremonies. She waited as long as it took until whatever it was that she wanted to see took place.

Leonore Mau never took sensationalist shots. And she didn’t ever photograph someone such that you get the feeling that in that moment the person was reluctant to be photographed. When you look at her portraits she took of people it is instantly clear that she did so with their consent.

As a medium, photography is very close to theft, but she never stole her pictures. She was also someone who people put trust in more than not. She never looked down on anyone. Rather, she would have looked for some hidden meaning that maybe she couldn’t grasp at first. She treated the people she met very attentively. She placed great value on understanding other languages. She and Hubert Fichte learned ancient Greek together in order to read in the original. Portuguese of course, English, French and Creole as well.

To put it poetically, she was simply also a world citizen. Her flat was wonderful too. What I loved most were all the delightful things she had brought back from her travels. Of course, the flat was enormous, with a fantastic layout, very stylishly furnished, yet with a great simplicity, not crammed full of stuff. Everything that had been Hubert Fichte’s she treated with very high regard. Like everything that Hubert Fichte had done was wonderful. She enthused about him to me. In this respect then she was also the classical “woman at his side”. Regardless: theirs was an amazing, extraordinary encounter. Given her whole story, she struck me as a very special woman. The decisions she made were not in any manner typical for her generation.

She had in fact studied set design and had intended to work as a stage designer, but then she became pregnant from this man who was twenty years her senior. You could say that because she was suddenly a married woman and mother she had actually lost part of her youth. But in the late sixties she managed to reclaim this for herself. And Hubert Fichte was per se someone who would venture into any milieus or parallel worlds for the purposes of research and opening them up or reporting on them. No matter whether it was the “Palette” or a psychiatric hospital in Benin.

One got the feeling that she had a very fulfilled life. She never ever complained, not even about her ailments or frailties as an old lady.