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Translated by Stephen
Smith
In April 2012 I had the opportunity of spending
a holiday with Lutz Fischer at his home in Apricale. I was
completely exhausted from my stressful job, but after only a day I
experienced a feeling of relaxation which came partly from the rural
surroundings and partly from the much more relaxed lifestyle of the
people around me. What a contrast after the hurly-burly of a city
like Hamburg! As a photographer, I was mainly interested in
documenting the people we would come across in this two-week holiday.
It was all unplanned and completely subjective: I just took the
pictures as the opportunities arose. Some of the pictures just
happened spontaneously in a moment, some after lengthy conversations,
and others just in passing. The two weeks of my holiday were a
wonderful experience. I took life as it came, met people, sat in
bars, read the day’s newspaper from cover to cover, ate well and had
nice conversations. It all helped me to slow down, and it led me to
take the decision to live a bit more slowly in future and to take
more time for myself and others. I look forward to coming back to
Apricale!
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Thomas Liehr, born in Hamburg in
May 1958, has been a photographer since his youth. He was
introduced to the camera and the dark-room by his father at an
early age. At the beginning of the 1980s he became seriously
involved in portrait photography. His financial independence
allowed him to undertake commissions for charitable
organisations, and this led him to distant countries, where he
made social documentaries in Rumania, Nepal, Bhutan, India and
Turkey.
Liehr excludes all background
detail from his photographs. His priority is “to photograph
emotions and thereby to give the pictures a certain tension,
depth and content”. This approach leads to portraits which show
people as they live their own lives, and which document everyday
reality from a human perspective. Thomas Liehr prefers to use
analogue equipment and black and white film.
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