Hamburg, Schulterblatt, summer 2017. Autonomists and police officers battle it out on the streets for hours. The riots during the G20 summit in Hamburg are the most serious the Hanseatic city has seen since the 1980s. Andreas Herzau has been taking photos all day, decides to take a break, goes to his apartment, sits down by the open window, pours himself a glass of red wine, smokes a cigarette, camera beside him. At that moment, a scene unfolds on the roof of a building opposite. He takes a photo and wins Germany’s most prestigious prize for political photography, called “Rückblende”.
From the preface to his book Moscow, one can deduce something of an explanation for this apparent “happiness”: “I am compelled to be attentive… to open myself up… and to realize that there is nothing more beautiful than taking photographs—in order to understand.”
It is all the more astonishing that Andreas Herzau was not a “trained” photographer. He approached his later vocation from a different angle: trained as a typesetter and typographer at the Tübinger Chronik, he worked as a production manager at the Cantz printing house in Stuttgart, did an internship at the Hamburg magazine Konkret, became editor-in-chief at the Hamburger Rundschau, before discovering photography as a freelance author. As a political person, he was not content with assignments for newspapers and magazines, but together with colleagues from the authors’ and photographers’ group Signum, the UNHCR, and a number of other international NGOs, he initiated the “Exodus” project, which was exhibited internationally and published as a book.
For me, however, the photographic work of Andreas and Signum is not the defining memory of the 1990s, but rather the “Jour Fixe,” which regularly brought together photo editors and photographers in the agency’s offices. With the help of a Kodak Carousel projector and reproductions on slide film, work could be presented and discussed in a friendly atmosphere over beer, wine, and snacks. I still miss those evenings today.
The common, the togetherness, the social aspect was always very important to Andreas, and after Signum broke up, he repeatedly brought together colleagues who were friends, whether in Hamburg’s Schanzenstraße or later in Bockup in the countryside. He co-founded an informal group that has been meeting at different locations for many years to discuss work, eat together, and sometimes even take “communicative flights over the Petri dish of visual communication,” as Klaus Elle so aptly put it.
Perhaps the decisive encounter for his further photographic work in the 2000s was the invitation from the art magazine ART to discuss the future of photojournalism with Gilles Peress in New York. Andreas used the hours of jet lag to drift through the city, taking photographs, knowing that it is actually impossible to extract unseen images from this city. After his return, planes crashed into towers, and he went back there immediately afterwards and then again in 2002. The large-format book New York, published the following year, can be read as a blueprint for everything that followed. Certainly influenced by Peress, but also by William Klein, Andreas sequenced his images as a kind of “stream of consciousness.” The photos, visually complex and radically conceived, are edited in sequence, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white. In the accompanying text, Christoph Ribbat writes: “Herz’s images deal with (…) the nervousness that arises when the city suddenly no longer makes sense. They document urban close combat, the sudden, inevitable confrontation (…) as abrupt as the garish colors that repeatedly interrupt the black-and-white cycle.
Although the images no longer form complete, obvious reportages, the works have a political dimension. Andreas saw the street as a stage on which a social drama is performed, ambiguous yet socially relevant. This continues in his later books Moscow, Germany, Helvetia, and Liberia. Germany in particular, whose publication date in 2006 involuntarily recalls a media-mystified “summer fairy tale,” could be read as an abstract reference to the present day. Elisabeth Biondi aptly notes in the accompanying text: “Old and new cleverly juxtaposed, I see the orderly and compulsively well-groomed, the frighteningly clean Germany, the same sad faces of older people who are always worried.” And who vote for the AfD, one might add.
However, my favorite book is Calcutta–Bombay, a Road Trip. Photographed for a magazine, the viewer becomes aware of how extraordinarily confident Andreas Herzau was in his use of aesthetic means. Free of any exoticism, one senses the pleasure the photographer took in appropriating the journey in terms of both form and content.
If that were all, it would be a lot. In addition to his photographic work, Andreas Herzau has also been involved in discourse. He has written texts, given lectures, and exhibited internationally. Beyond photography, his great passion was communication. He taught at the Haus Busch journalism center in Hagen, at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, at the Ostkreuzschule, was a visiting professor in Karlsruhe, a lecturer at the Burg in Halle, and for many semesters a lecturer in Bremen, where he also recently taught as a substitute professor. In addition, he organized and held workshops with a wide variety of institutions. He was a people person. Andreas loved to discuss things, passionately defending his position, but he was never domineering, always friendly, intelligent, and humorous. When asked whether he now had to vote for Hamburg’s conservative mayor Ole von Beust after photographing his election campaign in authentic black and white, he replied: “He only paid for the photography.”
The last major undertaking of his life was to transform the laif agency into a cooperative together with colleagues. Andreas was one of the first board members of the cooperative and was the driving force behind the subsequent establishment of the affiliated laif foundation, which was also a way to strengthen independent photojournalism.
Peter Bialobrzeski
In memory of our friend Andreas Herzau
“I am compelled to be attentive… to open myself up… and to realize that there is nothing more beautiful than taking photographs—in order to understand.”
Andreas Herzau