Astrid Proll - Hans und Grete : Bilder Der RAF 1967-1977 (Baader Meinhof : Pictures On the Run 1967-1977) - 1998

This stunning documentary photobook documents one of the most notorious terrorist organisation in the Western world: the Baader-Meinhof Group, or, as it called itself, the Red Army Faction (RAF) from the inside.

Astrid Proll, the photographer who made these images was an active member of the RAF, planning and participating inbank raids and serving as a getaway driver. After a year living in hiding roll was arrested and imprisoned. "Living underground is boring and isolating," says Astrid in retrospect. "Living illegally is a dead end when you are young."

Proll's volume of photographs of the Red Army Faction, its members, actions and victims is remarkable because of the images it contains and because of the career of the editor. Proll started off as a politically naive student of photography from Kassel who got sucked into the embryonic faction when she met the charismatic Andreas Baader in Berlin in the late 60's. She participated in an arson attack on Amerika-Haus in Berlin and subsequently went underground. She was caught in May 1971 and tried at the end of 1973. But the extremely harsh conditions under which she had been imprisoned while awaiting trial for 30 months had so ruined her health that the court had to abandon the case. The book follows the group from its formation as part of the anti-Vietnam protests in 1968, until the suicide of their leader Andreas Baader in Stannheim prison.

The first photo sequences are designed to show the undeniable optimism of the student movement until it reached a turning point with the shooting of a harmless student demonstrator by a Berlin policeman in June 1967. But her subsequent visual narrative seems to put the blame for the escalation of the next few years almost exclusively on the authorities. Many of the rest of the images highlight Red Army Faction members as victims, rather than those who were brutally murdered and maimed by them. Only three of over 90 photographs hint at the other side of the story and portray the terrible predicament of two hostages: Schleyer, just before he was murdered, and the Christian Democrat politician Peter Lorenz, who survived his ordeal. Otherwise, there is just one picture showing an exhausted Chancellor Schmidt offering his condolences to Schleyer's widow. If it was Proll's purpose to demythologize Baader-Meinhoff, if she wanted to end the psychological repression of the ''catastrophe that we steered into,'' her attempt to confront contemporary history is severely constrained by her own reluctance to deal with the full horror of the trail of blood that the gang left behind.

An important example of a protest photobook using a combination of powerful photographs combined with striking graphic design to produce a narrative of a turbulent time in German history.

Listed on
Lonuciano Zuccaccia ; Protest in Photobook: https://www.protestinphotobook.com/post/baader-meinhof
Jeffrey Ladd ; 5B4 Photography and Books: https://www.patreon.com/posts/baader-meinhof-62849354

Condition:
Very good. This is the first hardback edition by Steidl from 1998 (published alongside the Scalo edition) - not the later reprint from 2004. Text in both German and English. Tiny dents to back cover. White marks on black blank endpapers (common in this title from the book being opened and closed). Please examine listing photos carefully.