ERICH LESSING - PHOTOGRAPHY

On September 5, 2002, an extensive exhibition dedicated to the photographic work of Erich Lessing will open at the Palais Harrach. It will bring together about 350 photographs and focus on the big themes of his black-and-white photographic essays from the post-war years.

Erich Lessing was born in Vienna in 1923. In 1939, he was forced to emigrate to what was then the British Mandate Palestine. He studied in Haifa, worked as a carp breeder in a Kibbuz, and as a taxi driver before returning to the hobby of his youth, photography. He worked as a photographer in kindergardens and on the beach before working for the British army.

On his return ot Vienna in 1947, he started to work as a photo-reporter for the American news agency, Associated Press. The highly successful post-war illustrated magazines founded in the 1940´s and 1950´s employed a new generation of professional photographers, and the period was thus the golden age of photo-essays. Later, Lessing worked as a free-lance photographer for magazines such as Heute, Quick, Life, Paris Match, Epoca, as well as for the New York Times. Since 1951, Erich Lessing has been a member of Magnum Photos, an international cooperative of photographers with headquarters in Paris and New York that enabled its photographers to exert more control over the use of their pictures and the texts accompanying them.

Pictures from Magnum photographers are composed at the moment they are taken, the prints are not cut afterwards. This creates reports of great truthfullness. Lessing´s photographs document the depressing reality of life in Communist Europe, his pictures of refugees - Turks from Bulgaria, East Germans in the West - document the suffering and fear of all refugees, then as well as now. Lessing documented the big conferences (not without an ironic glance at the "secretive ones"), and the life of the workers both in the West and in the East.

But after the Hungarian revolution, Erich Lessing began to have doubts about the power of photography to influence politics. After 1960, he abandoned the genre of photo-essays and concentrated on history. He tried to reconstruct the life and the milieu of musicians, scholars, poets, physicians, and astronomers.

Eventually he turned more and more to history and art history. In over forty art books he recounts history and histories. His topics are the Imago Austriae as a history of Austria, the Bible as a history of the Jews, the journeys of the Apostle Paul, the political history of the Italian Renaissance, and the history of the Netherlands and of France.

Erich Lessing has collected his pictures in an archive of over 30.000 large-scale slides, the "Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archive". It is available on the internet at www.lessing-photo.com. The high-resolution pictures are digitalised and are available via e-mail. All the pictures on show in the exhibition have been scanned from a negative and then enlarged from the digital data file using lamda procedure.

Erich Lessing was awarded the American "Art Director´s Award" for his reporting of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In 1998, the Hungarian president honoured him with the Imre Nagy Medal. In recognition of his books and his whole oeuvre, he received the French "Prix Nadar", the "Dr. Karl Renner Award", the "Preis der Stadt Wien", and the "Ehrenzeichen der Stadt Wien" in silver and in gold. He is an honorary member of the Künstlerhaus (the Viennese Artists´ Association), and was awarded both the "Große Ehrenzeichen des Landes Steiermark” in gold, and in 1997 the "Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis für Fotografie".

Erich Lessing lives in Vienna, but is still an inveterate and keen traveller. He is motivated by his curiosity and desire to get to know the countryside, people, and works-of-art.