GR: So how did you go about it, did you both look through the photographs and then say, “This is a block. That might all fit together, these are the fish, and so on”?

LM: Yes, it all happened quite fast. But making the prints took quite a while. In the end I did a whole batch, several hundred prints in one go – all small-format prints, that took less time. In the process I also began to properly understand how you construct a film like this, how this can become a film. It is two altogether different things, whether you are taking one individual photo after another or taking photos for a film. There are photos I would never normally take if they weren’t for a film. For instance, the woman in the dockworker film who is standing in a quite miserable little kitchen, buttering sandwiches for her husband. I photographed all that kind of stuff!

GR: Do you then think more in sequences or episodes?

LM: Yes, you think more in terms of sequences and attach importance to certain things which I wouldn’t otherwise consider for a photo I normally shoot. Things that wouldn’t usually grab my attention. Hubert then calibrated the texts to the film’s time line. On the back of each photo he noted how long it should stay in frame, i.e. five seconds. I’ve no idea where he got this knowhow from. Everyone was thrilled. We then went to the animation studios of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk. They had a camera that was suspended, pointing down, and the photo lay underneath it. Then someone pressed the button for a certain number of seconds. And the outcome was the film.

GR: What about Die Spanische Treppe (D, 1970), do you still remember how things were?

LM: Yes, of course, I really enjoyed that too. Some of the people on the steps already knew me. No one ever abused me or shouted stuff like “Piss off!” The people there were from all walks of life. There was always something to photograph and no one ever said “no”. Even Ingeborg Bachmann came along. I did invite a couple of people to come especially. Hans Meyer, Bachmann and a few more. The others were all people who liked sitting around on these steps and chatting, or who slept on the wall.

GR: The film’s commentary includes a passage that talks about an obnoxious janitor. It’s a particularly daring passage that departs quite far from what’s happening just there in the images.

LM: That was the concierge at the Villa Massimo. As Hubert had found out, the man had a mirror installed inside his little janitor’s office so he could see who was entering and when, with whom, whether alone, or – God forbid! – with a woman or a man. He wrote it all down. That riled Hubert, who said, “I’d really like to kill him!”

GR: Or put him in the film! The journeys on which the photo films are based, beyond the dockworker film, came about during a certain period of your work when you left Hamburg and made your way to Africa and the Caribbean. Was in fact [Zwei Mal 45 Bilder / Sätze aus] Agadir (D, 1971), shot in Morocco, the final one in this series?

LM: Yes, it was. Personally, I feel it is weaker than the others. Particularly, it is only about architecture because in Arab towns, as well as in the country, people don’t want to be photographed.

You have to respect how they see things, namely that a part of their soul is being stolen from them. That’s why I think the film turned out to be quite boring.

GR: As such, Agadir is an interesting subject, since back then when you were photographing there it had just been destroyed in an earthquake and was then rebuilt as a modern city. But I too feel that the film doesn’t get properly inside this subject.

LM: No, it doesn’t. And when we started out we didn’t have this idea at all. And if you sense straightaway that people are getting angry at you for taking photos of them, it’s something you have to respect. I don’t like trying to catch people off-guard. Elsewhere I’ve also always asked people first. Except with the photos I took at the autopsy [in the portfolio Grosse Anatomie (1977)]. There, we met the doctor outside this house, someone we already knew, and he asked me himself. A bus had just drawn up that was empty. A dead man was carried out. The doctor said to me, “I have to go indoors now. Oh, you have a camera around your neck. Well, do you want to join me?” I thought, oh God, this smell – I won’t be able to stand it. But replied, “OK, I’ll come”. And then it was absolutely fascinating. A couple of times I was quite shocked at myself by how much it fascinated me.

GR: You and Hubert, did you mostly travel with very little luggage?

LM: No, not that little. I had my three cameras to carry, that’s a lot, then the various lenses for them. I was constantly changing lenses. I would still do that today too, because for me a telephoto lens gives you something different from when you go up close – also something you can’t do everywhere…

GR: You once told me that in those days you occasionally missed your films being first broadcast on TV because you had already left to travel again. So you produced them at the NDR and were then sometimes away for as long as a year?

LM: That’s right. It’s only recently that I first saw the film about Agadir.

GR: What actually brought this unusual experience with photo films to an end? Because it was for only a few years that you were making them.

LM: Because everyone stopped making them. We couldn’t make photo films on our own because we didn’t have the necessary film equipment. And then we got so fascinated by our involvement with so-called hybrid religions, as you can also see in our books. You can’t become that fascinated by two things at the same time and do them both really well.

Gerd Roscher conducted the interview with Leonore Mau on May 27, 2006 in Hamburg. 2009 the interview was published in the publication “Viva Fotofilm!” by Schürenverlag: https://www.schueren-verlag.de/programm/titel/279-viva-fotofilm-bewegt-unbewegt.html