Prized Lehnert and Landrock photo archive lives on in Cairo скачать в хорошем качестве

Prized Lehnert and Landrock photo archive lives on in Cairo

(4 Dec 2015) LEAD-IN: The 100 year old works of photographers Lehnert and Landrock are on display in downtown Cairo. The collection - 6,000 prints chronicling life in North Africa at the beginning of the 20th Century - were discovered by chance more than 30 years ago. Since then, Edward Lambelet has spent his life curating the archive. STORY-LINE: Tucked within downtown Cairo is a treasure trove to a time gone by. These are the iconic images of Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock. The bookshop, Lehnert and Landrock, has been trading since 1936. Towards the back of the shop, the walls are covered with black and white photos of sphinxes, pyramids and boats on the Nile. They make up the archives of the famous duo who together chronicled life in North Africa at the start of the 20th century. When Landrock left Egypt at the start of World War Two, Kurt Lambelet, his stepson, acquired the shop. A chance encounter by his son, Edward Lambelet, led to the photo plates being found - under a pile of dust. "Early 1980s, I discovered a wooden box, with old glass plates, I asked my father, what is that?" "I need the place (space) and he answered me, you can throw them away, but I never brought it over my heart, thanks God, I never did so. In short, we developed, I tried to understand what these photos were talking about, and you see here in the gallery the result of at least five years of heavy work." These days he's a retired doctor of Geology and the current proprietor of Lehnert and Landrock. He's spent much of his life sorting the plates, cataloguing and printing them to turn into an archive. It's been a labour of love; there's around 6500 prints in the collection. "He (Lehnert) started working 1904 in Tunis, but after the first world war, he came to Egypt, his friend was Landrock, the businessman, and as long as the two together were working, they were extremely successful," says Lambelet. Although it was Lenhert who took the photos, the work is attributed to both Lehnert and Landrock, because it was Landrock who commissioned the photos and ensured their sale. Many of the original plates have been taken from Egypt to Europe, and now sit in the Elysee museum in Switzerland. "The original glass plates are deposited in a Swiss museum in Lausanne, and there they speak of the photos of Lehnert and Landrock as one entity; it's not Lehnart, comma, and Landrock, but the two together produce a photo." Reproducing the photographs from the black and white prints has also been a hit with collectors and tourists keen to get hold of a little piece of history. Lambelet is well aware that the plates are fragile - some are 100 years old. He's put in in place plans to try and preserve the plates by producing a reference album for people to choose from. "I made this album because we cannot expose really everything, and any client who comes might be interested in one or the other photo. If you want to have this photo for instance, of a certain size, he (customer) choose the 'passe-partout' - black or cream, the frame - brown or black and within twenty minutes he gets the frame he ordered." Now in his seventies, Lambelet is still working hard to preserve the work of Lehnert and Landrock. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...