We mourn the loss of Andreas Herzau

We are saddened and saddened by the early death of our esteemed colleague.

Andreas Herzau died of a serious illness in the early hours of February 6, 2024. He was one of the most important German documentary photographers and set significant accents with his work, published numerous books, exhibited internationally and was particularly active in education at several universities over the past 20 years, at the HfK Bremen as a lecturer in the winter semester 2004/05, winter semester 2012/13, winter semester 2013/14, winter semester 2017/2018 and as a substitute professor in 2021 and 2022.

After training as a typographer, Andreas Herzau worked as a typesetter. In 1986, he completed a traineeship at the Hamburg magazine "Konkret", became a writing editor, but soon turned to photography. In 1992, he co-founded the photographer group "Signum" and has been a member of the agency "Laif" since 1999. Herzau has published in magazines and newspapers around the world and caused a sensation with his photo-essayistic portraits of cities such as Moscow, Istanbul, Calcutta and Mumbai. In his examination of familiar image stereotypes, he explored New York both before and after September 11, 2001 and attempted to sense the differences photographically.

Herzau lived in Hamburg's Schanzenviertel district for a long time and documented the violence of the protests surrounding the G20 summit there in 2017. He was an explicitly political photographer, but he was not interested in superficial topicality, but in the consequences of politics for people. He dealt with migration, the civil war in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the genocide in Rwanda. Herzau also portrayed the cult of the body at the Love Parade, at Nazi marches and in discotheques. In the book "Deutsch Land", he searched for "small things in his home country in the post-reunification period that have the power to tell of the big picture". Most recently, Herzau was awarded the prize for "the best political photograph of 2017". It shows police officers storming a house in Hamburg's Schanzenviertel district.

Andreas Herzau is known to a wide audience thanks to his long-term observation of Angela Merkel. The photographer followed her for ten years and documented her everyday life, particularly during election campaigns. The motivation for this was less political sympathy, he said, than an interest in how to do justice to a person who becomes unrecognizable every day due to an inflationary number of images.

In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Peter Bialobrzeski, a long-time professor of photography at the HfK, emphasized that his friend and colleague had lived photography as a cultural practice and had followed his own path between art and journalism. He always looked around in detail, saw signs, tried to find forms and then thought in series, which he compiled in books without explicit image texts, because the photos relate to each other like a film. According to Bialobrzeski, Herzau was never a loner; he loved informal discussions and debates in order to realize something together with his colleagues.
The Hamburg Foundation F. C. Gundlach Foundation now wants to take care of Herzau's oeuvre - and recalls the central characteristics of his work in an obituary: "With his photographs, he was always close to the people, often dynamically framing the subject of the picture in a cutaway view ... For him, photography was a form of research and empathy."

Perhaps exemplary of Herzau's political and humanistic approach is his book "Liberia". At the end of the last century, the media mainly wanted images of the civil war in West Africa. Images of horror. Briefed in this way, Herzau traveled there. At some point, however, he began to question this "white man's colonial view of a shanty land". The result of his self-examination was another trip to Liberia in 2020 to record scenes of people's everyday lives. We spoke to him about this during his time at the HfK Bremen - and would like to publish the text again below:

"In the beginning, there was the question of whether the fact that my photographic handwriting is often described as very unique and recognizable is a good thing, or a sign that I can no longer come up with anything new. Ultimately, that was also my motivation for the Liberia project, where I gave color photography a much larger space for the first time, changed the image format and looked for newer approaches during the development of the book, without denying my previous work." This is how photojournalist and photo artist Andreas Herzau, currently HfK visiting professor for "Photography - narrative and experimental", explains the initial idea behind his recently published book "Liberia" in an interview on the Fotogloria blog. It is an examination "of my own northern European, western view of Africa and an attempt to change the paradigm of the African continent".

Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world, around 80 percent of its four million inhabitants have no regular work, and was high on the horror list of current events - as a synonym for the forecourt of hell. Reports of atrocities committed by the war lords and their militias went around the world. From 1989 to 2003, around a quarter of a million people died in two civil wars, an entire generation grew up in war. Andreas Herzau experienced and documented the events and refugee movements on the ground as a reporter - today he says: "Under the impetus and simultaneous guise of humanitarian education, we photographers travel to these countries and report on conditions that are actually well known." 

When an astonishing process of reappraisal and democratization began in Liberia in 2005/06, the photographer was surprised that these developments met with far less interest in the Western world than the sensations of the negative that he and his colleagues once had to capture for the global media. According to Herzau, the European image of Africa is very much characterized by a focus on wars and crises. If the situation in one of the countries were to change for the better, nobody would report on it anymore. But that's what Herzau wanted, so he went there again in peacetime 2019 and started the attempt to be a photographer in a country far removed from Western prosperity, not a vampire of misery who aestheticizes poverty, but rather portrays people who do not feel humiliated by their everyday lives, but react with optimism, for example. This raises the question of whether illustrations of the poor-but-lively thesis in relation to Africans are not yet another cliché.
So "Liberia" is not about the US-fixated elite that has dominated the country since it was founded as a settler state for slaves sent back to Africa from the USA in the 19th century, but about the indigenous majority and the progress of political and economic development - as well as the search for a visual language for Herzau's interest in the positive. The inspiration for this was the text "How to write about Africa?" by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, which precedes the volume in German and English. According to a review by Gerhard Clausing in Photobook Journal, the essay "reveals an astonishing catalog of all the clichés about Africa that are dismantled by Herzau's work presented here." The result is a book with colorful images that show Liberians in their everyday lives, at work, at parties and during leisure activities, also depicting local customs and clothing styles and suggesting "that life is full of joy". One can almost be there, as Herzau is "particularly good at conveying unusual perspectives that create a feeling of participation in the viewer."

Andreas Herzau: Liberia 
146 pages of photographs in black and white and color 
Flexible linen, thread stitching 
ISBN 978-3-03850-079-7 
EUR 32,00