Photographer Leonore Mau – From Hamburg to the world

Jenisch House Hamburg
November 27, 2016 to April 23, 2017

The work and life of Leonore Mau (1916-2013) were shaped by her incessant travels. Her photographs from four continents were published in Geo , Spiegel , Zeit , and Stern . To mark the 100th anniversary of the photographer's birth, an exhibition at the Jenisch House will trace her travels.

With her camera, Leonore Mau captures manifestations of cultural identities. Her photographic style reflects the heterogeneous aesthetics of her subjects. Leonore Mau's images bear witness to cultural entanglements resulting from slavery and European colonization, and as harbingers of the globalization we know today. Her best-known subjects are African-American syncretic rituals and her work with the mentally ill in neocolonial Africa.

Her starting point was Hamburg: Here she bought her first Leica on credit and met her travel and life partner, Hubert Fichte. She portrayed his circle of acquaintances in the literary world and the Reeperbahn milieu, documented Hamburg's architectural development in the 1960s, and photographed a day in the life of a nomadic dockworker for a photo film. It was also here that she created her last series of enigmatic still lifes , Fata Morgana . The excursions between 1960 and 1985 make Leonore Maus's photographs a unique socio-cultural inventory, encompassing nearly half the world from her base in Hamburg.

The exhibition "The photographer Leonore Mau – From Hamburg to the world" is a collaboration between the S. Fischer Foundation, the Hamburg Historical Museums and the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and will be on display at the Jenisch House in Hamburg from November 27, 2016 to April 23, 2017.