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Andreas Herzau (1962-2024): “Unwavering belief in the importance of photography”

Photo:

Jörg Gläscher / laif

The renowned photographer Andreas Herzau is dead. Manfred Linke, one of the four founders of the renowned Laif photo agency, broke the news on Facebook: »Andreas was an inspiration for us. His ideas motivated us. We will miss his immense creative urge, his clear attitude and humanity," he wrote. Herzau's death is "a huge loss" for the Laif community, which he had a significant influence on.

The project with which Herzau is probably most associated is his long-term observation of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The photographer accompanied the politician for ten years, documenting her unusual everyday life and trying to get to know the person behind the sober professionalism with the camera.

One focus of the project was election campaign times, i.e. those three or four months in which politicians and citizens become unusually close. The last election campaign that Herzau supported was in 2017.

Photographs from the Civil War

Andreas Herzau, born in Tübingen in 1962, trained as a typesetter and worked as an author and editor in Hamburg. Herzau initially only pursued photography as a hobby before concentrating on it professionally in the 1990s. He became known to a specialist audience through his worldwide reportage work for German magazines and newspapers. In the mid-1990s, for example, photographs from civil war-torn Liberia caused a stir.

In 2003, Herzau published a photography volume entitled “New York,” which brought together images from the metropolis before and after the attack on September 11, 2001. "It's not always easy to assign the images to the 'before' or the 'after'," wrote SPIEGEL: "Maybe it's like this: the images haven't changed that much, but they are read differently than before. « Herzau also dedicated individual volumes to Moscow streets, Istanbul, Calcutta and Bombay. In 1997 he and colleagues organized a volume entitled »Escape. 50 million people without a home."

From the Love Parade to the CDU

But Andreas Herzau didn't just find his topics in the wide world. The photographer, who has been living in Hamburg's Schanzenviertel since 1987, reconstructed the life of a 75-year-old homeless woman who had died of heart failure - a life between a park bench, social welfare office and pedestrian zone. In 2002, under the title “Me, myself & I,” he showed the staging of bodies at the Love Parade, at Nazi marches, and in discos. And in the 2006 volume “Deutsch Land” he looked in his home country for “small things that have the power to tell the big picture.”

Herzau's black-and-white photographs of CDU candidate Ole von Beust shaped Hamburg's cityscape in the 2008 election campaign. Andreas Herzau also developed a special relationship with the musicians of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, whom he accompanied at concerts and tours and published several books with his photographic impressions.

Andreas Herzau was a formative representative of German documentary photography not only in practice, but also as a university lecturer. He repeatedly questioned his actions critically. He told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” in 2022 that he was thinking about traveling to a war zone in Ukraine. But: »I asked myself, what can I achieve there that other colleagues cannot achieve? What is my special view?". He “didn’t think of much.”

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Herzau’s return to Liberia 2020: “What is my special view?”

Photo: Andreas Herzau / laif

At the beginning of his career in Liberia, for example, he only looked for images of horror and ignored everything else. At some point he began to question this “colonial view of a white man on a slum country.” The result of the self-examination was another trip to West Africa in 2020 to record scenes of the everyday lives of the people there, collected in the illustrated book “Liberia”.

Feb