How do you manage to establish yourself as a photo agency in an ever-increasing flood of images?

For 40 years now, the photographers at the laif agency, based in Cologne, have been working to maintain the quality of documentary photography and thus counteract the sale of photography.

There are now more than 400 members in Germany and abroad who devote themselves to stories and events in order to capture them from a different perspective.

Ben Kuhlman

picture editor.

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This takes time.

The genre of laif has always moved between photojournalism and documentary photography.

The agency is now celebrating its 40th anniversary and is showing 40 works from different generations on this occasion.

Since its inception there have been many upheavals.

The biggest was definitely the switch to digital photography.

Not only for the photographers, but also for the ever-expanding photo archive, in which reports from all over the world can be found.

The exhibition in the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne shows a large number of these works.

For example, the photojournalistic work of Manfred Linke, who is one of the founders of the picture agency.

The photographer Katharina Bosse, on the other hand, focuses more artistically on human fragility in her work Surface Tension, in which her work moves between documentary photography, portraits and staging.

The range of works is also shown in a special printed edition that can be obtained from the MAKK shop.

In our questionnaire below, Peter Bialobrzeski (curator of the exhibition),

Peter Bitzer (former head of the agency), Silke Frigge (head of the agency) and Manfred Linke (founding member of the agency) questions about the laif agency and its history.

Manfred Linke

How did the photo agency laif come about? 

In February 1981 I was with my camera at the anti-nuclear demonstration in Brokdorf, a demonstration with the largest police presence in the history of the Federal Republic.

At some point, the peaceful protest turned to water cannon and helicopters.

Other colleagues from Cologne also happened to be there, some with and some without a camera.

We came back from Brokdorf and were horrified by what we had seen there, and quite quickly came to the conclusion that we wanted to publish our own view of current events in society, without any assignment at all.

A joint brochure with a subjective view of the events was created.

We edited the pictures, designed a layout, wrote texts and had the brochure printed by a friend's print shop. We even took care of the distribution ourselves.

What were the motivations and the idea behind it?

From this positive experience, the idea arose to join forces permanently, to build up a common infrastructure and distribution of our pictures and to share the resources.

With my former colleagues Günter Beer, Jürgen Bindrim and Guenay Ulutuncok, I first founded a photography office, which later became the laif photography agency.

Peter Bitzer

You looked after the agency during the period of transition from analogue to digital photography: What impact does this development have on photojournalism? 

For the photojournalistic agency business, this meant above all more speed and significantly higher image volumes.

In addition, the analogue archive had to be digitized and all images for the digital archive search had to be tagged more extensively.

Marketing and distribution had to be done in new ways.

These were all (also economically) very big challenges.

I'm very happy that laif, as an agency, managed this upheaval very well back then.

For the agency, but also for the photographers from laif, the upheaval that is still ongoing today, or rather its effects, is an opportunity to repeatedly deal with the most diverse aspects of their work.