Leonore Mau
'Second Sight'
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
02.02.2014 - 23.03.2014
The Hamburg photographer Leonore Mau passed away on September 22, 2013, at the age of 97. A side-gallery exhibition presenting exemplary individual works from the photographer’s large oeuvre will be held in her memory. The 2005 exhibition «Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau» at the House of Photography, paid tribute to Mau’s work in a comprehensive form.
© Installation view Deichtorhallen Hamburg
© Self-Portrait of Leonore Mau with a picture of Hubert Fichte, 60s
Leonore Mau worked for every well-known German magazine. She found the most important theme of her life in her documentary work on Afro-American and West-African cults and rituals, which she researched together with the author Hubert Fichte. Her pictures are explosions of color and full of magic — sometimes disturbing and always simultaneously artworks and records of ethnographic histories.
© Mother Darling, Xango Ceremonie in Trinidad 1973
Leonore Mau, 1916 born in Leipzig. From 1953 worked as a photographer, at first mainly with architectural photography. From 1962 she lived and worked together with writer Hubert Fichte. In 1964 she accompanied the writer to literary Colloquium Berlin, and in 1968 she visited him during a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. She made numerous portraits of artists and writers. In 1969 she traveled to Brazil for the first time together with Fichte. They explored in the following years, the Afro-American religions in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. In Africa, Leonore Mau documented mentally ill people in psychiatric villages in Togo and Senegal, as well as on the streets of Ouagadougou.
Leonore Mau Haiti 1972 © Nachlass Leonore Mau, S. Fischer Stiftung
In 1975 they got The World Press Award for the photo of an african boy with mask tablets. In 1988, she portrayed the Pina Bausch in Wuppertal ensemble. Later she mainly produces still lifes, masks and sculptures and Objects trouvé from her home under the title Fata Morgana. Leonore Mau died on 22 September 2013 in Hamburg.
In cooperation with the S. Fischer Foundation and the F. C. Gundlach Foundation.
© Deichtorhallen Hamburg