L'Orient
The Photographs of Lehnert and Landrock

 

An Introduction to the Orient
of Lehnert & Landrock
By S. Abdallah Schleifer

Catalog essay for thr Sony Current Show "L'Orient: The Photographs of Lehnert and Landrock "
October 4-June 28, 1999

From the pages of the National Geographic magazine and picture postcards on sale in European kiosks nearly one hundred years ago, to the black and white prints that sell year in and year out at the Sherif Street bookstore that still bears their name, the photographs of Lehnert & Landrock sustain a vanishing romantic image of the Arab world.

Rudolf Lehnert was born in 1878 in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he was shaped as a young man in the lush intellectual and artistic ambience of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1903 a walking tour across Europe led eventually to Palermo, where the monuments of a great Arab-Norman civilization and archaic Sicilian folksongs with their Arab melodic modes, known as Saracenia, may have influenced his decision to take a boat to Tunisia. There he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the country and starts what will become a lifetime career as a photographer, working in primarily in North Africa but also briefly in Egypt and Palestine.

When Lehnert returns to Europe he meets Ernst Landrock in Switzerland (also born in 1878), shows Landrock his Tunisian photographs and describes his experiences.

They return to Tunis together, having discovered they shared a passion for "L'Orient." By spelling out this word in French we understand it as a passion for a world defined in part by colonialism; more significantly, it was a passion for a pre-colonial traditional world in the process of being dismembered, distorted or perverted by colonialism.

Lehnert's photographs, like the work of his friend the painter Etienne Dinet (who took up residence in the Algerian oasis of Bou Saada the same year that Lehnert returned to North Africa and who embraced Islam in 1914), 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. One can assume that like Dinet, who wrote directly to this issue, Lehnert's work was to a large degree an attempt to capture the purity and beauty of a world that was rapidly disintegrating.

The most extreme example of this artistic struggle against the tide are the photographs taken in and around Bou Saada of the Ouled Nail. This mysterious Arabic-speaking yet ethnically distinct tribe, believed to have migrated from Morocco hundreds of years before the French conquest, inhabited the Ouled Nail mountains and by tribal custom sent their young women to the oases to acquire their dowries as dancers at public festivals and in cafés, choosing from among their admirers generous patrons. When their dowries were adequate they returned to their mountain villages and would marry within the tribe.

Even while they practiced their profession in the oases, they fasted Ramadan and patronized the shrines of Muslim awliya (holy men or women) like any other pre-colonial Algerian Muslims, to the bemusement of the French. They were an ancient geisha caste of North Africa in a pre-modern context that could tolerate within the social rituals of tribal sanctity the profane as well as the sacred.

In time the centralizing, rational, bureaucratic modern colonial state would reduce many of the Ouled Nail to prostitutes and register them as such. The destruction of the traditional economy and subsequent impoverishment of that part of the countryside that wasn't grabbed up by the French settlers following the conquest would drive some of the Ouled Nail into the brothels of Algiers and Tunis.

But Lehnert's portraits of the Ouled Nail, and in particular those who had remained in the countryside and retained something of their geisha-like dignity and grace, are haunting. It cannot be an accident that the same portrait of an Ouled Nail that graces the cover of this catalogue and the poster advertising this exhibition is the first picture to appear in Philippe Cardinal's book L'Orient d'un Photgraphe Lehnert & Landrock, appears on the cover of the French edition of Favrod and Rouvinez‚ Lehnert & Landrock: Orient 1904 -1930, and is the final and full-page photo to appear in Jane Livingston's book Odyssey: The Art of Photography at National Geographic, which in turn was based upon the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibit of a selection of photographs preserved in the vast archives of National Geographic.

The photographs on exhibit at the Sony Gallery reflect Lehnert's poetic concern for the desert, the oases and the beloved. Those exhibited at the Ewart Gallery (all of which are vintage prints) reflect his later, more documentary Cairene style and focus on street scenes and Islamic monuments. Books and catalogues devoted to the work of Lehnert & Landrock are also on exhibit at the Ewart Gallery, as are other memorabilia.

The shift in style may be attributed to a certain detachment that Lehnert felt in the Middle East in comparison to his almost ecstatic identification with the Tunisian and Algerian countryside and its people.

All Lehnert & Landrock photographs were signed "L&L" Strictly speaking, Lehnert was the photographer. But as Philippe Cardinal observes, if it was Lehnert who took them all, it was Landrock, the businessman 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 caravans to the desert and distant oases, and marketed their product. And he remained behind in Cairo when Lehnert, homesick for Tunisia, sold out his share of the business and returned to Tunis. In 1939 Lehnert retired, and when his wife passed away in 1944, he settled with his daughter and son-in-law in the oasis of Gafsa, in Tunisia, where he passed away in 1948.

Landrock, who carried on in close partnership with his son-in-law Kurt Lambelet, oversaw the transformation of Lehnert and Landrock into a major center for fine art prints and German books, and sensing that another world war is coming, he sold his share of the business to his Swiss son-in-law. He was in Germany on a visit when war breaks out. Landrock and his wife will never return to Egypt. In 1966 he passed away in Switzerland.

The prints on exhibit are the happy result of the discovery in 1982 in Cairo of Lehnert's original glass plates by Dr. Edouard Lambelet, Landrock's grandson and the present director of the Cairo bookstore and publishing house. The company remains basically a family firm, having survived British sequestration and the threat of socialist nationalization.

The quality of the product of these glass plates has been dramatically transformed through experiments conducted by the young Canadian master printer Chris Langtvet, who has devoted himself to this collection, working in Egypt and Europe for the past two years, and who is responsible for all of the prints on exhibition at the Sony Gallery.