IN: What are your thoughts about traditional healing as compared to modern Western psychiatry?

LM: I can’t really say much about it since I can’t compare the results. But the fact is that in traditional African therapy a tremendous amount of care and attention is given to the ill.

IN: In an interview with Hubert Fichte, Henri Collomb said that Western psychiatry was taking care of people in Africa who previously, since they couldn’t be moderated using traditional means, might have been driven out into the bush or even killed.

LM: In Fann they used medicines which are also used here, but in entirely different dosages, and some of these medicines have quite pernicious effects.

IN: You also photographed the administration of electric shocks.

LM: I thought to myself, “you have to photograph this”, because this is something Collomb had actually declared inappropriate for the hospital in Fann. But there was still an old pavilion where this was being done. It was so awful. The plug was simply stuck in the wall socket, then something broke in the brain.

IN: There’s something of a renaissance for electric shock treatment happening right now.

LM: Yes, I’ve heard that.

IN: Although not in such high doses.

LM: Something’s being measured, but the brain is still a mystery and there’s still so much to research about it.

IN: In an interview with Hubert Fichte some of the doctors said that they administer electric shocks not only because there was a lack of certain medicines, but also because family members specifically ask for it. For them, an electric shock is comparable to a ceremony of ritual death.

LM: Only that whatever gets broken in the brain is not even understood by people here in Europe yet.

IN: In Senegal you also photographed a particularly intense traditional healing ceremony, the N’Doep.

LM: A mentally ill woman is made to sit on a bull. The bull is then killed and, the person and the bull are… not exactly “buried”, but several sheets are thrown over them and she has nothing but a small hole to breathe through. Afterwards, she is rubbed all over with the blood and wrapped in the bull’s intestines. You could say a kind of olfactory shock therapy. It’s such a shock that many patients really do return to normal life. Just imagine, you’re buried with a dead bull and then its blood is rubbed all over you. And then you have to dance for hours on end. You’re never left alone, and this goes on for a full week. And if they didn’t have success with this method, they wouldn’t do it. Then people would say you’re all crazy. But it works.

IN: In Explosion, the novel about your trips to Brazil, Hubert Fichte describes how you tried to find all the ingredients for an initiation drink – which is practically impossible because there’s an incredible number of different terms for them or the same terms for different ingredients. Just before you returned you drunk this indeterminate potion. Do you have any recollection of this?

LM: Oh, yes, I still remember. On the plane, I felt something itching, but when I tried to touch it my hand went somewhere else entirely. After two days, everything was back to normal.

IN: Did you also let rituals be conducted on you?

LM: No. We were very strict about that. Hubert Fichte once told a priest in Venezuela who’d begun sticking needles in him, “If you do that, we’ll never come back”. We wrote about it and photographed it, but in such a short space of time it would have been impossible, it would have been a complete lie to decide to take part in it. At the most, and there’s a very fine photo of this, a priest once ended up, at six in the morning, daubing a sign on his forehead with a bloody finger.

Besides, when you’ve got the camera you’re somehow also protected from getting carried away with it all. It once happened to me when we went to Haiti for the third time and were invited to a ceremony by a voodoo priest. It’s fantastic how they drum, and after three hours I wondered, “What’s going on?” My legs completely gave way and Hubert Fichte just managed to catch me. So basically, I’d fainted. That never would have happened to me if I’d had my camera. You’re so awake then. But without it – naturally, they were very pleased to have this white woman experience what it was all about.

IN: The best known German ethnographic photos are surely the Nuba photos taken by Leni Riefenstahl.

LM: Yes, the photos themselves are remarkable. For me, they’re too close to being advertising photos, too beautiful, really. But she was an incredible person. That she cannot throw off her association with the Nazis is her bad luck. But her film about the Nuremberg rally is extraordinary because it documents how the Nazis turned the Germans into a machine, a functioning machine. I’d like to see someone else try and do that. Loads of people immediately say, oh, Leni Riefenstahl, that creepy old Nazi – to me that’s ridiculous.

IN: Leni Riefenstahl also lived with the Nuba people.

LM: There’s this amazing photo showing her standing on a sandy path next to a buck-naked Nuba twice her size.

IN: Even if you, as a photographer, have the feeling that you’re not really present – the observed person does perceive your presence and perhaps acts differently.

LM: I can’t be the judge of that because I am not around to see when I’m not present. No way of doing that, unfortunately. The lines between objectivity and subjectivity are completely fluid. Objective, subjective – it’s an invalid differentiation. I can only photograph what fascinates me completely. Someone to whom I have absolutely no relation, that’s going to be a bad photo. And it was the same thing with the rites. I also don’t see myself at all as an ethnographic photographer, but as a photographer who takes pictures of whatever completely absorbs me.

In photography, you are fully engaged in the moment in which you are taking the picture. Either you’ve got it or you haven’t. Especially when it comes to the ceremonies. I’ve never said, “Do that once more”. That’s nonsense, it doesn’t work. But someone who writes can take notes or has something in their mind and can work it all out in peace – or less peaceful moments. That’s not something a photographer can do.

IN: For Hubert Fichte, what was the relationship between word and image? Did he not also see a rivalry between his texts and your photographs?

LM: No, he loved to describe things in total detail. If he hadn’t, we would never have stayed so long in Brazil, for example, or anywhere else. He’d always say, “You’ve still got to take this and take that”. The famous blood bath – it really thrilled him that I took that. Hubert Fichte reacted entirely positively to my way of taking photographs.

IN: What do you mean, “positively”?

LM: The fact that we talked about it and that he helped me. But he never touched a camera: he said he never wanted to take a picture in his life. But the best photos of me were taken by him.

IN: What do you mean?

LM: Exactly what I’m saying. We were once sitting in a train opposite one another. The train was completely empty. And then he said, “Focus the camera on me, then give me the camera and I’ll take a picture of you”. That’s exactly what happened and it’s one of the best photos of me ever taken.

IN: Hubert Fichte’s magnum opus, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensibility), begins when Jäcki, a homosexual, and Irma becoming intimate with one another. It isn’t difficult to see the two of you as Jäcki and Irma. Is it not uncomfortable for you to be revealed in such a way?

LM: No, not at all. I’ve been asked that many times. In interviews – one SPIEGEL journalist started off with “pillow talk”. I told him, “I’ll not say another word”. But literature is literature. There, I’m fully on the side of the word. If someone writes well they can write anything and everything.

With the general decline of language we’re seeing now, I think one has to form a relationship with language. That’s why this country no longer has any power: language is going to seed. It has lost its credibility.

IN: When did that begin?

LM: I believe it’s the result of losing two world wars. A country cannot get over that so easily. And of over-ageing. I’m not exactly a spring chicken myself now. But keeping sharp about being here and observing, that’s still very important to me.

IN: Are you referring to spoken or to written language?

LM: Both. Well, the kinds of words you sometimes hear in the media, the way they are strung together, such endless chains of words. Of course, the language bandied about by politicians has also had a huge impact. That also is pretty dreadful.

IN: Maybe it was in the past as well.

LM: Yes, but in the past politicians weren’t so much in your face. If people got to see their kaiser or their king just once a year, that was already a lot. These days, the poor people are sat in front of the television every day.

IN: Running to 19 volumes, is surely one of the lengthiest novelistic projects ever. Did Hubert Fichte plan to create something of this size from the very outset?

LM: Like anybody who is developing something entirely new, he rarely spoke about it because he himself had the feeling that it wasn’t yet finished. Then, one day he came back from Weinstrasse – that’s the main shopping street here in the Othmarschen neighbourhood of Hamburg, a couple of blocks away – carrying nine orange files. He announced he was throwing away all his old black ones and was going to start a new work. Then he explained it to me in length, and all of a sudden the place was full of orange files. He was very attached to seemingly innocuous things like that.

Unfortunately, while working on it he fell very ill, went into hospital in January 1986 and was operated for lymphatic cancer. But he was able to give very precise instructions – it was his body that was affected, not his mind – as to when, what and what not, and how. Unfortunately, in our German republic there are still some philologists who persist on claiming that this is an unfinished novel. That’s simply wrong.

IN: And do you know why he refused to publish certain finished sections until he had completed the entire Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit?

LM: I can’t tell you that either. When he developed a concept for something, he didn’t set forth explaining it, that was just the way it had to be.

IN: Was he thinking of Proust, who only began publishing his Recherche towards the end of his life?

LM: Maybe he was: he also deeply worshipped him.

IN: Hubert Fichte died almost twenty years ago. Why is Psyche, the book of text and images about the mentally ill in Africa you jointly compiled, only now being published for the first time?

LM: The publisher had released Xango and Petersilie, two books of text and images about African-American religions, and it was supposed to be a trilogy. Two top-level people from the publishers were here and looked at the material on the light box, and were thrilled. Let’s do it! Then the publisher came over straightaway: we sat here from morning till evening and discussed each page.

Then Hubert Fichte’s health increasingly deteriorated and he had to go to the hospital. And after the first operation I received a letter from Fischer Verlag saying that they had a new marketing person who’d costed the publication and said, “Are you crazy, it will be far too expensive”. And then we received heart-rending letters saying they would go ahead with it nonetheless, and so on, and in the future… all these promises, but they never lifted a finger.

I believe that if Hubert Fichte had not been ill they would have behaved differently. He could also get very aggressive. He once told me about a meeting with the publisher, Ms. Schoeller, where he said he wanted an advance, for this and that, I think it was about 50,000 marks. And she said, so you want to have some money? And he replied, no, I want to spend it.

I then set Psyche aside and signed the contract for Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Then, for the next three or four years – I was hopeless at typing – I typed up the book, Explosion. That’s over a thousand pages and in a handwriting that’s hard to decipher. For me, at that time, photography was completely off limits for a while. But all the books came out.

IN: So how did Psyche come to be published after all?

LM: Ronald Kay, Pina Bausch’s partner – I’m very good friends with her as well – looked at the slides and said we should make a dummy. So we made laser copies of all the slides. A year ago, Ms. Schoeller, the publisher, received the mock-up for the first time and decided then and there to publish it. That’s how excited she was.

IN: The layout is still…

LM: … It’s Hubert Fichte’s.

IN: Are you still photographing?

LM: Yes, photos that I fabricate myself. Using plants, shells, whatever is around in the house. They’re called Fata Morgana.

IN: Don’t you miss taking photos outdoors, on trips?

LM: Of course I do. At the moment I can’t because with both knees having been operated on walking is quite hard. But if I were to be invited now, I’d do it right away. As long as I had the money to pay someone to accompany me and carry the camera.

IN: Even if it were far?

LM: Yes, the long flight – you’re being served, you watch a film, you’re glad to be travelling so far away, you can look out of the window. What’s so arduous about that?

IN: As far as I know, you never travelled to Asia. Why was that?

LM: Because that would be too much. Life is too short. Above all, you have to learn the languages and it all costs unbelievable amounts of money. We never received any public funding. Once we got something from a foundation, but it was just a modest sum. Actually, we earned it all ourselves. And to do that, you have to work a horrendous amount.

IN: You financed your trips with commissions from newspapers, magazines and radio.

LM: Yes, we planned and kick-started everything. There was always some part of the day when we would be glued to the phone for an hour or two. But then, off, off and away. I don’t know how people can stand it, stuck here in Germany all the time.

IN: Did you never think of moving away for good?

LM: No, and not just because of the language, either.

IN: You’ve been living in your current apartment almost since you moved in with Hubert Fichte.

LM: I should cast a gold statue of the owner of this building, really. Fine, people say the building needs this being done to it or that, that it ought to be renovated, but I don’t really care. This person has never raised my rent since Hubert Fichte’s death – out of sheer decency. I’ve got tons of room here, I’ve got a darkroom and it’s an incredibly beautiful apartment.

What day is today?

IN: The first of April.

LM: The day of Hubert Fichte’s funeral, April the first.

IN: Would you normally visit his grave?

LM: I’m not one to visit graves, and nor was Hubert Fichte. We once talked about this for a long time. He was very attached to his grandmother and was very upset when she died, but he said he’d never visit her grave.

My views on this are less extreme. I had a very beautiful stone installed at the grave with a carved quote from Empedocles, whom he loved so much. I still remember a completely empty beach in Brazil and seeing him suddenly with a stick in his hand, the kind you find on the beach, and he’d inscribed this sentence in the sand: Before now I have been at some time boy and girl, bush, bird and a mute fish in the sea.