Lothar Wolleh

In 2007, the comprehensive retrospective Lothar Wolleh – Eine Wiederentdeckung: Fotografien 1959 bis 1979 (Lothar Wolleh - A Rediscovery: Photographs 1959 to 1979) was shown in Germany at Kunsthalle Bremen, Stadtmuseum Hofheim, Kunstmuseum Ahlen, and the Deutschherrenhaus Koblenz.

In 1979 Lothar Wolleh died after an asthma attack in London, shortly after he had photographed Henry Moore. His grave is on Gotland in Sweden.

In his final years between 1977 and 1979, Wolleh had several stays in Poland. At his death, the unfinished photo volumes The Black Madonna of Czestochowa and Wawel Castle were still underway. Posthumously, numerous portraits of the Polish avant-garde have emerged.[1]

Several book and art portfolio projects remained unfinished, so a volume to Lucio Fontana, Jan Schoonhoven, The illustrated book "Men of Management", in which company founders and managers of the leading German companies were portrayed, was not to be released because of feared attacks by the Red Army faction. Another project was Das Unterwasserbuch, which Beuys and Wolleh had planned together; he created 51 format-filling pictures for the book. The photographs were taken during the construction of the Beuys exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1971.

In 1969, Wolleh traveled for several months through the Soviet Union. The photographs taken on this journey found their way into the 1970 illustrated book USSR - The Soviet State and its People, which he published together with Heinrich Böll and Valentin Katajew with Belser publisher.

From 1962 until his death he lived and worked in Düsseldorf as a freelance photographer. Initially, he worked primarily in advertising, but later focused on his artistic work. In 1964 he married his wife Karin. His son Oliver was born in 1965, and his daughter Anouchka in 1966.

In the years 1962 to 1965, Wolleh photographed the ground-breaking Second Vatican Council in Rome. With the help of Father Emil Schmitz SJ, Wolleh's first photo book Das Konzil, II Vatikanisches Konzil was published in 1965 by Belser. In 1975, he photographed the Jubilee celebration, and published the photographic folio Apostolorum Limina. This work, with its blurring, represented a radical evolution of Wolleh´s color photography, as hinted by his first book.

As a freelancer for the advertising agency TEAM, which also included Helmut Newton, Wolleh became one of the most famous and expensive fashion, advertising, and portrait photographers in the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1960s. His clients included well-known companies such as the Deutsche Bundesbahn, Tchibo or Volkswagen. In 1965 he portrayed Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in his campaign for the general election.

In the late 1960s, at the request of his friend the German painter Günther Uecker, Wolleh began to systematically portray more than one hundred international well-known painters, sculptors, and Actionists. From the 1970s, Wolleh did relatively little work as a commercial photographer, devoting himself almost exclusively to his series of artist portraits, in which he initially photographed the well-known artists of the Düsseldorf scene, including Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. Soon however, his project expanded beyond the borders of the Rhineland to the whole of Europe, focusing on the Zero group, and Nouveau Réalisme, with members such as Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely.

For the next six years, Wolleh was confined in the GULAG labor camp Vorkutlag in the USSR, where he did forced labor in a coal mine. Wolleh was able to return to Berlin in 1956, after Konrad Adenauer's successful negotiations for the return of German prisoners of war. Torture after his arrest, and the long hard detention and working conditions in coal mining, left behind physical damage and post-traumatic disorders. However, the GULAG labor camp Vorkutlag allowed Wolleh's first contact with photography and his mythical worship of light.

After his return from exile, from 1956 to 1957 Wolleh resumed his education in the Lette-Verein, a continuation school for photography, design, and fashion in Berlin. He took part in a regular monthly recovery program of the World Council of Churches for war-damaged youth. This program made it possible for him to visit the Swedish island of Gotland in 1958, which was an inspiration for his lifelong strong affinity towards Sweden, its culture, landscape, and people.

From December 1947 to October 1949, he lived in “Boys Town” in Bad Vilbel, in a camp run by the US Army for uprooted young Germans, based on the model of Father Edward J. Flanagan. A few months after his return to Berlin in July 1950, he was arrested by the Soviet occupying forces and sentenced by a special court "OSO" (remote judgement from Moscow) to 15 years in a forced labor camp, for alleged espionage and diversion under Articles 58.6 and 58.9 of the USSR.

Lothar Wolleh was born in Berlin-Wedding, the first of four sons of the unmarried worker Else Martha Wolleh. He spent the World War II years in Berlin, suffering the heavy Allied bombing campaign that finished the long struggle. The death of his uncle's family as well as his participation "in the last squad" during the final battle for Berlin in April and May 1945 left deep psychological scars. In the grim, post-war years from 1946 to 1947, he studied "concrete painting" in the elementary school class at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst ("University of applied arts") in Berlin-Weißensee.

Lothar Wolleh (January 20, 1930 – September 28, 1979) was a well-known German photographer.