ROBERT LEBECK
German
Robert Lebeck stands among the great German photo-
journalists. In more than a half century of work—20
years of which he spent with the German magazine
Stern—he has produced photographs of significance
and authenticity, consistently managing to capture
people and powerful situations in photographs.
Lebeck was born in Berlin in 1929. He grew up
with his grandparents in the town Jamlitz near Ber-
lin, and in 1943 at the height of World War II
he became a soldier. He was subsequently captured
and became a prisoner-of-war. When the war
ended, he was released from an American prison
camp and went on to earn a high-school diploma
in Donaueschingen, Germany. Then, in Zurich
and later at Columbia University in New York, he
studied ethnology. He traveled throughout the Uni-
ted States, working as an usher, as kitchen help,
and with the railroad. The skills he acquired in
the United States were to serve him well as a photo-
journalist. In the United States he chanced upon U.S.
magazines such asLifeandLookand was fascinated
by their variety and quality:
I only later learned that the magazines in Germany before
the Hitler period were as world renowned as the American
magazines of the 1950s. From their reputation I came to
understand what qualified as a good photo essay and what
it meant to respect photojournalism. And I did all of this
without realizing that I would choose this career.
(Steinorth 1993, 6)In 1952, he returned to Germany and received a
job with the U.S. Army in Heidelberg. The next
year, his wife gave him his first camera. The leading
German photojournalist and fashion photographer
Herbert Tobias (1924–1982), who was returning to
Heidelberg from Paris, taught Lebeck how to
develop film and make enlargements. His first
photo, of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Baden-
Baden, was published in July 1952 in theRhein-
Neckar-Zeitung, a newspaper in Heidelberg. The
following year Lebeck worked for various news-
papers in Heidelberg.
When Winston Churchill received the Karlspreis
award from the city of Aachen in 1956, no journal-
ists were permitted to attend the closed dinner
festivities. Lebeck disguised himself among the
kitchen workers and photographed the great leader
at the banquet; Scotland Yard confiscated the film.
The next day Lebeck was again prepared and hid
behind a curtain as members left the reception.
When Adenauer suddenly asked for a photogra-
pher, Lebeck was ready.
By the middle of the 1950s, new magazines had
begun to make up a significant portion of the press.
Among them wasKristall, out of Hamburg, where
Lebeck had his breakthrough in 1960, traveling for
three months across Africa. It was the year that the
European powers bestowed independence on their
last colonies. There, as the state of Zaire (now
Congo) declared its independence and the Belgium
King Baudouin and President Joseph Kasavubu
drove along the boulevard in an open car, Joseph
Kasavubutooktheking’sswordfromthecar’sback-
seat. Lebeck was the only photographer who re-
corded the scene.
In 1966, Lebeck went to Hamburg to work for
Stern, which had become the biggest weekly maga-
zine in West Germany. He was always there at the
focal point of events. In 1963, he was at the corona-
tion of Pope Paul VI. Lebeck photographed Cardi-
nal Ottaviani laughing as he kissed the pope’s hand;
he would have so much preferred being named
pope. This image has become an icon of photo-
journalism. ‘‘It shows what it means to be there
when the event takes place,’’ Lebeck said.
He made a gripping photograph at American poli-
tician Robert Kennedy’s funeral as the coffin was
carried from the ceremony into the night. When
Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary lea-
der, returned to Tehran from Paris after 15 years of
exile, Lebeck sat with him in the plane. His photo-
graphs of Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran suggested the
coming of war, which the Islamic revolution would
begin only a few months later in the name of Allah.
These photographs reveal the photographer’s
special skill at recording situations in the second
that history and a decisive historical moment melt
together. Also important is that Lebeck ignored all
the prevailing rules of photography, which makes
clear that such photographs require the total sen-
sory perception of a watchful and decisive eye.
Although Lebeck’s photography exhibits a light-LEBECK, ROBERT