Between 1924 and 1930 Lehnert & Landrock made a number of trips to
Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. From those trips what remains as a
heritage are 250 photographic glass plates from Palestine and a few
more plates from Syria and Lebanon. From the number of glass plates
it seems that most of the focus of their travel was in Palestine.
Nearly half of these glass plates are stored in the Musee de l'Elysee
in Lausanne.
All Lehnert & Landrock photographs were signed "L&L." Strictly speaking,
Lehnert, a sensitive Central European artist shaped by the lush Viennese
cultural milieu at the turn of the last century, was the photographer.
But as Philippe Cardinal observes in his book "L'Orient D'Un Photographe:
Lehnert & Landrock," if it was Lehnert who took them all, it was Landrock,
of German birth and Swiss adoption, who made them possible. He ran
the shop they founded first in Tunis and later, after World War I,
in Cairo; he managed the laboratory, organized Lehnert's expeditions,
and marketed their product. Lehnert & Landrock's photographs helped
define that portion of the West's understanding of the Orient that
was attracted not merely by the exotic but also by the overwhelming
beauty and dignity of the traditional Arab environment.
The prints that have been exhibited at the Sony Gallery are the happy
result of the discovery in 1982 in Cairo of Lehnert's original glass
plates by Dr. Edouard Lambelet, Landrock's grandson-in-law and the
present owner of the Cairo Lehnert & Landrock bookstore and publishing
house. In turn the quality of the product of these plates has been
dramatically transformed through experiments conducted by the young
Canadian master printer and photographer Chris Langtvet, who has devoted
himself to this collection, working in Egypt and Europe for the past
few years, and who is responsible for all of the prints on exhibit.
