Erich Lessing

Alistair Crawford Erich Lessing

Born in Vienna in 1923, Erich Lessing was forced to emigrate to Palestine in 1939 at the age of sixteen. His mother remained in Vienna and died at Auschwitz. His grandmother remained in Vienna and died at Terezín. His best friend was finally caught and died in German- occupied Belgium. Lessing returned to Vienna in 1947 as a photographer and worked for the Associated Press. In 1951 he joined Magnum which the ICP Encyclopaedia of Photography indicated in 1984 ‘became the pre-eminent photographers’ agency for the quality of its members work was unequalled.’ This co-operative was formed in 1947 with offices in Paris and New York by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour and William Vandivert in order to have more editorial control over their work.

Magnum were responding to the growth of the highly successful post war photography magazines of the 1940’s and 1950’s who employed a new breed of professional photographers. Lessing was to work for some of the most distinguished, such as Life under Stefan Lorant, Picture Post under Tom Hopkinson, or Quick Magazine and Paris Match. It became the age of the photo-essay, led by the Americans, by W Eugene Smith (1918-1978) with the day in the life of Dr Ernest Guy Ceriani of Kremmling, Colorado who became the definitive ‘Country Doctor’ for all time when published in Life magazine in 1948. Europe already had its equivalents, for example, in the excellent reportage of the Swiss photographer Felix H Mann (b.1893) who became the chief photographer for Picture Post in 1938.

With its sequence of images, derived from the cinema, informed and controlled by a written text, this narrative photography had grown out of Paul Strand’s (1890-1976) and Alfred Steiglitz’s (1864-1946) ideology of Straight photography, with its rules regarding the purity of the photographic process; perfect negatives, unmanipulated in the darkroom to produce straightforward prints. Such devotion to the integrity of the negative could thus correspond to the integrity of the statement, hence the value of such an approach for reportage, for documentary, with its notions of honesty, truth, justice. The post war professional photographer, including advertising and fashion, was essentially an American idea, of having a career, being hired and paid-for, ‘commercial art’ and, as photo-journalists, always trying to go where angels fear to tread, on our behalf. These professionals were thus at odds with the amateur, that wayward, European, artist-photographer who seemed, in comparison, to be too preoccupied with aesthetic concerns. Steiglitz’s and Strand’s earlier allegiance to the turn of the century Secessionist Pictorialism, with the salon exhibition and the prize medal for the unique print, thus became anathema.

Photo-journalism also allowed for the photograph to be a conveyor of meaning, a narrative text where the personality of the photographer was not the intention. While this did not always hold true, it is doubtful if Erich Lessing’s work of this period will ever be marketable in tomorrow’s salerooms of art as merely an identifiable style, the only apparent requirement in today’s age of the logo. Indeed many such photographers believed that the less their personality appeared in the work the more reality, the truth, could be shown. Lessing is not interested in the cult of the artist as individual, as a unique and precious form of self- expression, a marketable, enigmatic personality. Indeed his love affair is still with what is being photographed, its meaning, rather than any exploration of self.

The 1950’s photo-essay led, in turn, to the photo-book. Paul Strand was to produce his famous contribution, Un Paese in 1954, that influenced another generation, especially post- war neo-realists in Italy, with its evocation of W Eugene Smith’s equally influential photo- essay ‘Spanish Village’ made for Life in 1951. Due to technical improvements colour also made its appearance in the mass market in the wake of the post-war euphoria and the drive for that better, essentially materialistic, American life. Promises, and desires, are always better in colour. Erich Lessing started using colour at the same time as his close friend and fellow Austrian, and Magnum photographer, Ernst Haas (b.1921) who also produced one of the first colour photo-essays in 1949 before emigrating to the United States in 1951. Haas’s highly successful photo-book The Creation, published in Switzerland in 1971, was probably the epitome of the genre. Between 1956 and 1995, Lessing was to publish 47 such ‘photo-books,’ including Travels of Ulysses which sold over 75,000 copies in several editions and won the Prix Nadar Prize in 1966.

In Erich Lessing. Fifty Years of Photography, the travelling exhibition and book sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a never-ending world tour, like the photo- essays it recalls, is divided into themes which also recall Edward Steichen’s mammoth photography exhibition The Family of Man. Curated for the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955, with 503 photographs by 273 photographers representing 68 countries, Steichen presented a view of human universality divided only by the diversity of the human condition. Lessing’s themes in his collection include Post War Period East and West, with studies in power, individual, personality-power, that is frightening in its confirmation of just how readily we all allow the one to decide for all of us. Not much us in these pictures. Like the boy Lessing wrenched from his family in Vienna and shipped out alone to Palestine, to an unknown, foreign country, with a different language, Refugees reminds us of our present horror of the crass futility of human behaviour with its pathetic preoccupations of race, religion and nationalism, that is our contemporary Kosovo. The photograph ‘Turks expelled from Bulgaria, 1951’ appears to us at this point in time to be ever thus. Such behaviour is also confirmed in the theme Church and Synagogue under Communism. Lessing’s famous depictions of the Hungarian Revolution reverberated around the world in 1956 and won him the coveted American Art Editors Award.

If Erich Lessing had done no more than contributed to photo-journalism, he would be part of that very same history, yet, in 1960, he was to give it all up, give up the reporting of the making of history for an examination of history itself. He was to call it ‘photographic evocations,’ recalling the world of past musicians, poets, physicists, astronomers. Photography’s instant time was now to be used to recall past time, time long gone. His themes then began to reflect the change: Cinema, Artists, A Walk through History, where the illusion of black and white photographs of actuality give way to fictions now depicted with the reality of colour. Such apparent contradictions also provide layers of meaning.

You could argue that Erich Lessing had opted out, had opted for an unreal world. He had indeed changed much since being a ‘staffer’ for the New York Times. Now he was working with ideas of history, with dead time, with matters of art and religion and culture, with matters of the human spirit. He no longer believed in photographs as the active agents of history, no longer believed that reportage could change peoples actions, change the nature of politics, of human behaviour. (although later he did acknowledge the effect of photography on the American public during the Vietnam War). In a sense he underestimated himself for even my teenage years were fundamentally affected by those very same images of defenceless, friendless Hungary calling for our help in 1956. I was eleven then and I can still recall my shame at my country’s denial. Lessing’s metamorphosis was still to be rooted in narrative, still in ‘telling tales’, written meanings attached to constructed images. To my mind, he had not so much changed into something else but simply, albeit profoundly, reverted from a primarily American, new world order of things, back to an essentially European one. A philosophical view of the world, derived, in part, from the embedded richness of our long European memory, had reasserted itself. Perhaps, as a person, Erich Lessing had finally come home.

Photography is about time, but time is a complex affair. Time as immediate photography is the essence of journalism, such as the influential Hungarian photographer Robert Capa (1913- 1954) and his timeless image of the actual moment of the ‘Death of a Loyalist Soldier 1936’ who was shot during his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. A photograph taken in that single instant of relevance. All war photographers ever after would search for the opportunity to pay homage to Capa’s exact moment in time, sure in the belief that, if successful, they would be able to answer the question, as indeed Lessing was able to do during the Hungarian revolution in 1956. The decisive moment entered our language from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (b.1908) book in 1952, with his notion of unlocking, not only Capa’s immediate time, but, in that same split second, all the inherent meaning in a scene, if the photographer could engage. Cartier- Bresson added the complexity of the encoded photographic image to Capa’s moment of immediate importance. Such a notion as a decisive moment in time also gave validity to the search for the newsworthy concept, to be found, for example, in Lessing’s ‘Revolutionaries have executed a member of the Hungarian State Police, October, 1956’. Surely it is one of the most harrowing images of its time, not least the depiction of the indifference of the spectators. Alas, we may have become immune to such images today but, at the time of its appearance, it demonstrated Lessing’s unique capacity for confronting the human condition.

While photo-journalism could imply that photography’s attribute is the interruption of actual time at a strategic moment, an idea also encapsulated in the speed of its process, nevertheless, photographs seem to become more richly meaningful well after the time of their making. Only then can we see more clearly - see more clearly our own reflection now expressed as a history, a photographic history. The time of the photograph is not 1/125th of a second, but the decoding over a period of time of an encoded image. Since they are interruptions of actual time, all photographs, even fictions, reveal, unlike some paintings. A photograph can be revealing of an entire age, period, epoch. They also reveal, in addition, according to the photographers’ capacity, put very simply, to live. They reveal the constructed photographic thought of their makers.

In many ways all of Lessing’s work is fundamentally about time. They are as much about evocations of Copernicus’, Galileo’s, or Isaac Newton’s time, dead time, as about the time of the making of the photograph, as about the time of the maker of the photograph, as about the time of the viewer of the photograph, now engaging with the image. They are about your time. Hence, even film time, artificial, made up, unreal time, can be just as revealing as actual time.

My special, meaningful, image is Captain Ahab tied to Moby Dick, made for John Houston’s film, released in 1956. An unreal photograph - there is no whale, a made up reality, derived from another man’s made up fiction, a tall tale spun by a long since gone Herman Melville (1819-1891). In this image, Lessing, and John Houston, produce the very essence of Melville’s density of language, its complexity, suffocation, that dark, trembling fear, those rich, longed for passions struggling to liberate themselves from the embroidered, yet censored, language of their birth. Who thinks this story is about a whale? ‘Had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks: he only feels, feels, that’s tingling enough for mortal man!’ ‘Moby Dick, Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck), tied to the white whale, Canary Islands, 1954’, now that’s reality. Artificial time, can also be reality for the real world surely lies not in what we see, in what the camera sees, in those mere descriptions of arbitrary particles of transferred light, simple chemical reactions on a surface, but in what we feel. Reality lies in the realm of sensation, of emotion, of belief, of self. In particular, as befits the photograph, as befits the contribution of this extraordinary photographer, reality lies in memory.

This essay was first published in: Erich Lessing. 50 Años de fotografia, Ministerio Federal de Asuntos Exteriores de Austria / Austrian Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Agens-Werk Geyer + Reisser, Vienna, (Spanish edition), 2000, then in Erich Lessing 50 Años de Fotografía, Sala de Exposiciones ‘Palacio de Pimentel’, Valladolid, Spain, 2002 (catalogue), in Inscape 39, Summer 2000, and as Erich Lessing. People Known and Unknown on the occasion of his exhibition at Photofusion, London 2003.

In 2002 Alistair Crawford was invited by Erich Lessing to curate, design and write the accompanying book for his retrospective Erich Lessing. Vom Festhalten der Zeit. Reportage– Fotografie 1948-1973 held at Palais Harrach for the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, (4.09.02 – 13.10.02). Part of this exhibition was also shown at Photofusion, London (2003), Paris (2004) and in New York and Washington, USA (2005).