Heinrich Riebesehl - Agrarlandschaften - 1979

MOST FAMOUS BOOK TITLE by the IMPORTANT GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER Heinrich Riebesehl (1938-2010), mentioned here: Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The photobook, vol 2, page 267.

TRUE ORIGINAL FIRST PRINTING in the VERY IMPRESSIVE OVER-SIZE-FORMAT
(there was published, much more later, in 2002, a much more smaller format edition).

SCARCE GERMAN PHOTOBOOK TITLE - with the VERY SCARCE ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET
(the big, fragile jacket in great, much better, whiter and fresher condition than usual).

Heinrich Riebesehl is - alongside Bernd and Hilla Becher - the great documentarist of German photography in the second half of the 20th century.

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Schmalfeldt, Bremen. 1979. First edition, first printing.

Hardback with full black cloth and dustjacket. 296 x 402 cm. 96 pages. 84 black and white photographs. Photos: Heinrich Riebesehl. Additional photos: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Ansel Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Minor White. Design: Hartmut Brückner. Text (introduction essay): Peter Sager. Text in German.

Condition:
Book inside and outside clean with no marks and with no foxing; pages with light yellowing at the edges, smell a bit like smoke. The extrem fragile dustjacket almost complete (neat missing part at the bottom of the spine, no other missing parts), with trace of use, some small imperfections at the edges (much less than usual) and light yellowing (much less than usual), with tear (professionally taped from behind) at the top left corner of the rear side (no other tears). Overall fine condition.

German photobook classic - with the original dustjacket in much better than usual condition.

"Heinrich Riebesehl was a German post-war photographer and university lecturer.
In April 1963 Heinrich Riebesehl began his studies with Otto Steinert at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen in the photography work group. In 1965 he left the Folkwangschule after a conflict with Otto Steinert, but resumed his studies in October 1972 after being accepted into the final semester on Steinert's advice. In January 1973, Riebesehl completed his studies with an overall grade of "very good". As his practical final thesis, he submitted photographs from the series Locomotives, Sabine, People in Lifts and Self-Portrayals, among others. Riebesehl wrote his theoretical thesis on the subject of "photographic memories."
The work "Situationen und Objekte" ("Situations and Objects") brings together individual images taken by Riebesehl between 1973 and 1977 in Germany, Japan and Scotland, which can be stylistically assigned to "Magical Realism" and "Subjective Photography" as influenced by Otto Steinert. Situations and Objects is an attempt to make visible the element of the magical, the unreal, inherent in seemingly everyday situations or ordinary objects. Riebesehl worked with hard contrasts and unusual perspectives in order to isolate the objects or people from their surroundings and to situate them in a new context, contrary to the usual viewing habits. Here too, as in the conceptual portrait photographs, the images are numbered consecutively instead of having titles.
The subjective approach Riebesehl pursued in Situations and Objects gives way to working in a documentary style in the series "Agricultural Landscapes", taken from 1976 to 1979. The photographs show a sober, objective image of North German landscapes, mostly deserted and distanced. By choosing a wide-angle framing and a light that is as neutral as possible and by refraining from technical manipulation, Riebesehl pursues the goal of creating an "image that is as simple as possible and easy for the viewer to comprehend".
While Riebesehl initially photographed with a 35 mm camera, he first switched to medium format for the agricultural landscapes and finally to large format (plate camera) in the following series. On the one hand, this technique made it possible to produce detailed, large-format prints with many gradations between black and white; on the other hand, the size and weight of the camera and the resulting need to work with a tripod and slow shutter speeds created a certain static and distance in the pictures. The spontaneity of situations and objects gives way in Agricultural Landscapes to a slower, more considered way of working.
Based on the documentary visual language developed in "Agricultural Landscapes", further series of North German cultural landscapes were created in the 1970s, including industrial buildings, port facilities and railway landscapes. Taken together, these represent an attempt at a topographical survey of the North German landscape and its transformation in the course of increasing industrialisation. Riebesehl worked on this complex of works until the beginning of 2000, which he completed in 2001 with the series Dorfansichten, for which he photographed in colour for the first time. For Agricultural Landscapes, Heinrich Riebesehl was the first photographer to receive the Bernhard Sprengel Prize for Fine Arts in 1981."
(Wikipedia)