Interviews
Ingo Niermann in an interview with Leonore Mau (2005)
Ingo Niermann (IN): What brought you to photography?
Leonore Mau (LM): Every person’s life develops in some direction. Life holds all kinds of accidents in store. How did two people who married get to know each other? There are so many absurd stories. Like a friend of mine who left the house one evening in the pouring rain to post a letter and from the opposite direction a man with an umbrella approached the letterbox, also with a letter in hand. In that moment – he became her husband. Likewise: how do you end up with your profession?
After doing my Abitur I went to art school, but with our flight from Leipzig to here in Hamburg in ’45 we were left with nothing, absolutely nothing. It takes years before you can lead a normal life again. As a refugee you are a second-class citizen until you suddenly shift up to become first class again because you are doing something that’s successful.
It all came down to me managing to get a camera, a Leica, and what I actually wanted was… but why am saying all this? I am a photographer, period.
IN: And did you immediately realise: this is now my profession?
LM: Yes, I was never a casual kind of photographer. Once I’d got the camera in Hamburg and started using it, with the very first film I shot I produced the cover photo for a Hamburg harbour magazine. It took off right away. Even though I took very few photos of Hamburg.
IN: Hamburg didn’t interest you much?
LM: There are plenty of fantastic photos of Hamburg, it’s enough when other people do that.
IN: You then started photographing houses for architecture magazines.
LM: I was once asked by an editor if I also photograph architecture? And since back then I was still married to an architect and knew a bit about it, I started doing this and earned good money with it, which I urgently needed in order to buy really good camera equipment.
IN: After moving in with the author Hubert Fichte in the early ’60s what was your first joint project?
LM: We made photo films for German television. First here in Hamburg – Der Tag eines unständigen Hafenarbeiters. Then in Sesimbra in Portugal. Actually, the reason we went there was because we loved the sound of its name. It used to be a very beautiful fishing village by the sea, but being so close to Lisbon it has now turned into a tourist hotspot. In the middle of the village there was a fish market, and in fact all I photographed was fish. For a 20-minute film you need about 500 or 600 photos. That’s a lot, but I absolutely loved doing this work. Hubert Fichte then selected them, decided on their sequence and how long each image should last: he edited the film.
Then I made another photo film in Rome on the Spanish Steps. They were always crowded with young people, then at the top was this elegant hotel from where elegant people descended. For the whole time we were at the Villa Massimo, that was where I went.
Sadly, photo film as a medium is no longer particularly en vogue. Otherwise I could compile a photo film, for instance, from all my documentary material on African-American religions.
IN: Your research into African-American religions started in 1968 with a journey to Brazil. How did this trip come about?
LM: For a start, we had enough money at the time.
IN: Hubert Fichte had just published his novel Die Palette.
LM: Yes, and he had earned quite a bit of money with it. Then we bought our tickets, first for a short trip – three months, which is not so long.
IN: And what made you decide on Brazil?
LM: Because we knew that the most beautiful rites took place in Brazil – those of Candomblé – and because we could speak Portuguese.
We would pass through a favela at night, always following the drumming. Wherever it sounded the loudest and most beautiful, we’d stop in front of a hut. But we didn’t go inside; instead, we just waited. The people have a sixth sense – or seventh or eighth – and after a couple of minutes two of them came out and asked us what we were looking for. Since we answered in Portuguese, they were instantly well disposed towards us and invited us to come inside. I asked them if I could also take some photographs. They then talked among themselves for a while without realising that we perfectly understood what they were saying. What they said was, “Here are two people from Europe and the woman wants to take photos. But there’s no harm in it since the gods won’t allow it, so nothing will appear in the photos.” But the gods allowed it after all; it was all there on film.
After our three months were up, we decided to raise money to return for a full year because the most important festivals happen throughout the year. And we photographed all of them.
IN: The interest in African-American religions not only led you to Africa. But on your trip to the Royal Court of Abomey in Benin you also brought a message from the priestesses of the Brazilian temple Casa das Minas, which is said to have been founded 300 years before by an enslaved daughter of the King of Abomey.
LM: Everyone in Brazil knows what the Casa das Minas is. The priestesses are held in great esteem. We told them we were travelling to West Africa and they gave us a message and a tape with a recording of their singing to take to the Royal Court of Abomey. As a mark of his ambassadorship, Hubert Fichte received a colourful glass bead necklace. Each colour and the respective positions of the glass beads to one other represent something in particular.
At the Royal Court, once they’d inspected the necklace and listened to the singing on the tape, they took a large sheet of paper and wrote an invitation to the priestesses of Casa das Minas.
IN: Did they understand the Brazilian singing and the necklace?
LM: Yes, they were deeply impressed and moved.
IN: Did the priestesses take up the invitation?
LM: I don’t think so. Somehow or other we would have heard about it. The priestesses of the Casa das Minas told us that they would have to go to Abomey one day because something was missing in one of their rites. So Hubert Fichte said, “We’d better start right away. Twice a week, we’ll study French.” Hubert began teaching them French and it was all going very well, but then he died.
Later, the priestesses sent me a message via someone who was coming to Germany to say that the Casa das Minas wished the necklace to be returned. Just imagine how people here in Germany reacted when I told them about this: What, some old string of glass beads? You must be nuts. – No, it’s a very special glass bead necklace and I don’t want to discuss it with you anymore. I flew to Brazil and brought the necklace back to them. They were so thrilled, it was lovely.
IN: At the Royal Court of Abomey you also took the fascinating and disturbing picture of a young boy wearing an empty blister pack of pills as a mask.
LM: We were standing on the street looking around us. Suddenly I saw the boy standing there. Without any explanation I told Hubert Fichte, I’ll be back in a moment – because I was afraid the boy might run away. I asked him to stand still because I wanted to take his picture – which thrilled him.
Children in West Africa are unbelievably skilled in imitating things from found rubbish or simple materials. Recently there was a film about Senegal where confecting imitation toys has become a veritable industry.
IN: Have you never taken a picture without asking first?
LM: No, I’ve always kept to the rule I set myself never to become the unsolicited photographer who collects people. In fact I’ve always asked first, at ceremonies too. Whenever we heard that there was a temple somewhere or other, we first went there without a camera, introduced ourselves and asked if we could participate. And when they agreed, we stayed through to the end. Not shyly, just snatching a glimpse the way tourists do, but sometimes really for twelve hours at a time.
Hubert was a genius at scouting things out. And he always got what he wanted – it was amazing, he had such an aura. We were refused just once: but that was understandable because it was a secret ceremony. Otherwise it always worked out.
IN: There’s a description by Hubert Fichte in his book Petersilie: “A boy has strapped on an airplane, blood-smeared metal, mirror shards. He’d bound bulging lips studded with boars’ tusks to his face, which he took off when Leonore wanted to photograph him.”
LM: That could very well be because there is a superstition – very strong in Islamic countries – and you have to be very careful because they believe you’re taking their identity away from them. I never insisted, never said, “But I want this, do this for me”. I never ran into difficulties because this is something I always respected. But on the other hand, there were also times when I turned up without my camera and someone would ask, “Where is Kodak?”
IN: Did it ever happen that someone was willing to let you photograph, but it still struck you as indiscreet?
LM: The line between indiscretion and fascination is very, very thin. In Brazil once, there was catastrophic flooding caused by rain. It poured for days on end and all the favelas slid down the mountain, and for days we couldn’t get out of the little house we’d rented because it was surrounded by water.
When I finally managed to get out and head towards the centre of the city with my camera, there were dead bodies in the streets, completely swamped in mud. I was about to photograph them when the police saw me with my professional equipment – and they immediately tore off the sheets covering the dead. They practically challenged me, with friendly gestures, to take a picture. And I did as well – it is featured, very small, in the photo book Xango, along with this story.
IN: In West Africa, in the ’70s, you shot photos of the mentally ill who were being held in public places. Didn’t they feel as if they were on display?
LM: On the contrary. They were excited to have so much attention being paid to them. No problem at all. That was in Togo or Benin. The people who – as is said – aren’t normal, they weren’t put in clinics, but instead staked out on the public squares. That way, they’re still part of the community; people talk with them. Children especially like talking to them and they like talking to children. Of course, sometimes people also laugh at them, but they’re never treated badly. That’s what we honestly observed, we spent a whole day in such a village. No aggression.
Of course, it is horrible too, but they don’t have any money for a hospital. And ultimately, when you think about it, you can be declared insane by society – it happens very quickly – and then you are lying there all day long, more or less looking at nothing but white walls. That’s a perfect recipe for going mad.
In Africa they also have completely different explanations for mental illness; for example, bad treatment of dead family members. If you don’t honour them properly. If someone breaks society’s rules, it doesn’t mean he is immediately cast out. You’d really have to be stark raving mad before they say: he is ill.
IN: How did you first get involved with mental illness and psychiatry in West Africa?
LM: In Senegal, there were many intellectuals we spoke to who told us about the famous psychiatric school in Fann and accompanied us there as well. We spent three weeks there in 1974. Very nearby was a small, respectable hotel. Without knowing about it beforehand, this too was where we experienced an amazing solar eclipse. The employees in the hotel were trembling with fear – they had the feeling that everything had come to an end, the end of the world, the end of life. That was quite formidable.
Fann was run by the French professor Henri Collomb. We also flew with him in his small plane to Casamance, to the psychiatric village there he founded. The village was constructed in such a way that the sick could live together with members of their family. They had their own little straw huts and could cook there as well.
Once a week, the doctors would meet with a patient and his family for a pinth, which in Wolof means “get-together”. The case would then be discussed, but most of the doctors only spoke the colonial language, French. Only one of them was able to speak Wolof because his wife was Senegalese. Hubert Fichte wrote about this in his text, Gott ist ein Mathematiker (God is a Mathematician). If you can’t speak to someone declared mentally ill in his own language, that’s insanity to the third degree.
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.
Untitled (Launches in the Port of Hamburg), 1966
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Ohne Titel (Maison Jaoul), 1960
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (Fish market by the sea), 1964
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (On the Spanish Steps), 1967/68
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (Priestesses of the Casa das Minas Temple), 1981/82
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (Hubert Fichte at the 106-year-old
King of Abomey), 1975
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (African Boy with Blister Mask), 1975
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Ohne Titel (Hubert Fichte in psychiatry
in Fann), 1976
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Untitled (Hubert Fichte in Trinidad), 1974
In the picture book Hälfte des Lebens. Leonore Mau:
Hubert Fichte. Eine fotographische Elegie
von Ronald Kay
© Nathalie David
Untitled (The bloodbath), 1971
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Fahrt nach Karlsruhe, 1965
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Hubert Fichte
The picture book Psyche
© Nathalie David
Fata Morgana, c. 2002
© bpk / S. Fischer Stiftung / Leonore Mau
Nathalie David in an Interview with Leonore Mau (April 2006)
Excerpt from the interview. Conducted in Dürerstraße 9 in the Othmarschen of Hamburg.
Leonore Mau (LM): We wanted to go to Brazil, that had always been our dream but the travel was simply very expensive.
From one day to the next we bought the ticket and got the plane. We wanted first of all to see what Brazil really looked like! We had learnt to speak Portuguese properly. If you don’t speak a language here’s barely nothing you can do. That was the problem in Africa. If you can’t speak a country’s language there is always distance between you and the people.
One evening we were in a favela. Hubert Fichte said, when we hear drumming the first thing we should do is stand still, then follow the drum rhythms. We heard the drums and came to a halt in front of a hut. We had been standing there for barely five minutes when a woman came out and started talking to us in Portuguese.
And then we told her what we wanted and who we were, and she replied: “Come in!”
It was so impressive how deeply immersed they were in this ritual. For them, nothing else mattered other than the gods, the dances and the chants. I was totally entranced! I could barely contain myself. I still can’t, even now, when I describe it.
Candomblé, this rite. It’s everywhere in Brazil, even in the south in Sao Paulo. But the classical place for it is Salvador in Bahia. And that’s where we then went to.
I am not really afraid of dangers because people always exaggerate them.
Only once, in Rio, I was stopped on the street and told, “You shouldn’t be walking around here on your own”. And I asked, “Why not?”
“It’s too dangerous!” And then I told them that I take photographs. “Then we’ll accompany you!” I thought, “Oh God!” So they then kept following me around. I wasn’t at all happy about that.
The way I photograph is hard to describe because I don’t really have a concept for it. Instead all I have is the capacity to start talking to people I happen to like. I would never just suddenly ambush people and announce, “Hello, you are interesting! Click, click!” (laughs) That’s not my thing!
I observer! Suddenly it strikes me how beautiful or interesting someone looks. It could be a child, it could be an adult.
I always took two cameras with me. Two completely identical Leicas.
Of course, they are quite heavy to carry around. How often in my life I have screwed on or unscrewed lenses and put them in their pouches… a hundred thousand times! Occasionally I switched them, to black-and-white or to colour, but not always.
The first photo I took of Allende was a disaster because the Hasselblad is so loud that the poor man was utterly startled. He was really in danger, because two years later he was dead.
Feeling very guilty, I put the Hasselblad to one side and continued photographing with the Leica. Which is extremely quiet.
When we got back, I picked the photos up from PPS (FC Gundlach’s lab) and then went through them at home with y heart pounding. Then Hubert Fichte joined me. We sat there till five in the morning. At one point we nearly had a fight over one shot that I insisted on being included. And he said, “No, that’s kitsch! You can’t include that one!” It was taken near the famous waterfalls “Saut d’Eau” in Haiti, where festivities take place each year. I thought it ought to be included. “No, it should be left out!” “No, it should be included!” “No, you can bin it immediately!” “No, I’m not going to chuck it out!”
The point being, there was a woman lying in the water. Those waterfalls are quite turbulent, and she is holding her little child – I don’t know whether it was her own – in both hands, she was holding the child with its head tilted backwards into the waterfall. I thought it was so good! And for him it was kitsch. So it isn’t in the book, but I didn’t throw it away.
The idea for Die Spanische Treppe was mine, but Hubert accepted it straightaway. Yes, he thought it was a great subject. The visual complexity of all these totally different people gathered there and who had not squabbled, or at least not ostensibly.
Nathalie David (ND): Who was important for your work?
Leonore Mau (LM): Le bon Dieu! (laughs)
Untitled (Leonore Mau on her 90th birthday), 2005
© Nathalie David
Ohne Titel (Portrait of Leonore Mau), 2007
© Nathalie David
