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Robert Lebeck was born in 1929, making him one of the generation who went to war young. In 1944 he was called up for service in the Wehrmacht and was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was taken prisoner in 1945. The fear of death but also the strength of his will to survive were things he discovered as a fifteen-year-old on the Oder river. behind a machine gun facing oncoming Soviet tanks.

'Unverschämtes Glück' in der Photogalerie der VHS Stuttgart Copyright Robert LebeckHe escaped death but not the collapse of his world and the dissolution of any kind of order. This can be seen in his pictures: in the gentle grief that marks many of his photographs, in the scepticism with which he regards all façades, in the inner distance he maintains from the people while showing them so clearly from close up.

In 1952, four months after he began work as a photographer, the first Lebeck photograph appeared on the front page of a newspaper. It was a picture of Konrad Adenauer in the Heidelberg Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. Lebeck was 23 years old. He photographed weddings, football, carnivals, children, whores, lord mayors, jazz clubs, students and cripples. The subjects were numerous.

The idea that a picture should have an inner “integrity” was always the guiding principle of Lebeck’s work and the reason for his success. The breakthrough to fame came a few years later, in 1960, when he made a three-month tour of Africa for the Hamburg magazine Kristall. At last he would follow in the footsteps of those jungle explorers whose exploits had thrilled him as a boy. The reality turned out to be different. Africa was a political witch’s cauldron. It was the year in which the European powers were granting independence to their former colonies. In Leopoldville the world press gathered to cover the independence celebrations in the Belgian Congo, the largest country in Black Africa. Standing in an open car, King Baudouin was driven through the city. Suddenly a black youth seized his sword from him and ran off brandishing the captured weapon in triumph. Lebeck had shot the picture of the year. A symbol of the decline of the power of the white man and of the bloody chaos into which the Congo was soon to sink.


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