Research Log
Uncovering the Mysteries of the Photography Collection: Robert Lebeck
by Janne van den Bergh in collaboration with Ana Carreres Llopis
by Janne van den Bergh in collaboration with Ana Carreres Llopis
January 16, 2025
In this research log by Janne van den Bergh, former Curatorial Practice and Research intern for the photography collection at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in collaboration with Ana Carreres Llopis, former intern within the Conservation and Restoration department, dig into the origins of a photograph by Robert Lebeck. While a part of the collection, the photograph lacks complete archival information. It shows a ceremonial sword in the act of being stolen on June 30, 1960: the day the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained independence from Belgium. Read on to learn about the various methods in which an object’s provenance can be determined.
Sometimes, things fall through the cracks. Sometimes, we do not know how something arrives in a collection, albeit in a museum, library, or archive. In the first weeks of my internship, I came across a photograph that immediately intrigued me, but had very little archival information attached to it. I wondered how this photograph had ended up in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum.
Since I could not find the answers in the museum’s archives, I decided to dive deeper into it. It raised the following questions for me: how can we and how do we deal with information gaps in the collection? If the picture lacks archival information, how can we, for instance, know who commissioned the photographer to print it, or if it was the photographer’s hand that made the print? I would like to take you along on my journey with this photograph and how it ended up in the museum. Specifically, I intend to share how two ways of researching came together as one. I did not undergo this journey on my own, and through collaboration with Ana Carreres Llopis this research has developed into what we are presenting to you now.
Robert Lebeck was born in Germany in 1929 and started his career in 1952 after receiving his first camera. Within ten years he was well established as among the best photographers in his country.[1] He traveled around the world and documented his trips for various magazines. In 1960, he was working on an assignment for the German magazine Kristall.[2] It was then that he traveled to the Congo to capture the ceremonial handover of the country by the King Baudouin of Belgium to President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the new Republic of the Congo.[3] During the ceremony, Baudouin and Kasavubu were driving around Leopoldville. In an unexpected turn of events, a Congolese man took the ceremonial sword from Baudouin right out of the car. The picture taken on the evening of the Congo’s independence, became famous around the world and helped Robert Lebeck establish his reputation as a prominent photojournalist (fig. 1).[4]
At the beginning of my internship, I did not know anything about Robert Lebeck, he was just a name attached to a photograph in a sea of images, lost to the magnitude of the collection of the museum. It was during the first few weeks of my internship, when I started reading the Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time by Mark Sealy, that the name resurfaced. As I was reading this book, I came across the photojournalist and recognized his name, but I could not pinpoint exactly where I had seen it before. Decolonising the Camera examines the racial politics at work within photography as a result of Western imperialism by refocusing the way we perceive the Other in these photographs.[5] Sealy examines the series of photographs Lebeck took during that same evening in which the Congo celebrated its independence. By continuing my work categorizing the photographs from the collection, I made the connection. The collection holds only one photograph of Lebeck’s, and it is also his most famous image. There is a tendency to isolate photographs. Now I found out that there were many other photographs taken that day of the same event. I felt these were equally as important in showing the context of the events that took place. Each photo in the series is part of a sequence that shows the lead up to the grabbing of the sword, and the aftermath. The “thief” was arrested by the Belgian military present during the event.[6] The image in the collection shows the exact moment that the sword was taken. It isolates the decisive moment and tells us little about what happened before and after. Taken together the photographs tell us that even though the colonial period has officially “ended”, the colonial oppression from Belgium is still very much present. With this series of photographs, Lebeck managed to capture the dichotomy of the independence and the formation of a new state.[7]
The only information available about the photograph in the collection, was where it had been found: in the museum’s storage in 2004, the first time it was registered as being part of the collection. I speculated, however, that it had been there for much longer since there is no information about how this picture arrived, nor registration of it having been in an exhibition around 2004. It is likely that the photograph was placed there before a head curator for the photography collection had been appointed. If it was left after 1976, it could have been acquired by then head curator of photography Els Barents. It could also have been offered to the museum after an exhibition. Either way, the picture was almost forgotten. Nowadays though, everything that comes in and goes out of the museum is carefully registered. It is at this point that my research into the photograph split off in two directions. On the one hand I wanted to find out how it was acquired, on the other, I wanted to know if it was printed and authorized by Lebeck himself. I felt that the knowing who printed the photograph and authorized the print could help me answer the question of how it ended up in the collection of the Stedelijk and thus the search continued.
I could find little to no details in the archives of the Stedelijk about the picture. There was only a small newspaper article on Lebeck in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1984 (fig. 2), and the reportage book TOKIO MOSKAU LEOPOLDVILLE (fig. 3). The article gives a little overview of Lebeck and his life, while the book includes photographs he took on his travels to Tokyo, Moscow, and Leopoldville. The cover image is that which the Stedelijk holds in their collection. After this turned out to be a dead end, however, I contacted Willem Diepraam, a famous Dutch photographer who had a large personal collection of photographs, part of which is now held in the Stedelijk. I asked him if he had been behind donating this particular photograph. He replied to my email, but alas the answer was no. After consulting with researcher Frank van Lamoen, we thought the photograph might have come from the exhibition Mensen op Weg in 1964 (fig. 4) since we found Lebeck’s name included in associated archival records. After consulting the digital archive, newspaper clippings, and the exhibition catalogue I found that even though Lebeck was featured in the exhibition, the photograph in question was not. Besides this exhibition, I could find no record showing that Lebeck had been featured in another exhibition at the Stedelijk.
Fig. 2. Langer, Freddy. “Der Fotojournalist Robert Lebeck,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 26, 1984.
Fig. 3. Robert Lebeck and Fritz Kempe, TOKIO, MOSKAU, LEOPOLDVILLE: Robert Lebeck Reportagefotos Aus 3 Erdteilen, 1962, 1–2.
Just when I felt I did not know how to continue the research I met Ana Carreres Llopis, Conservation and Restoration intern at the Stedelijk. We talked about the photograph and thought we might get more answers about its acquisition by looking into whether the print housed in the collection was printed and/or authorized by Lebeck. To research this, we looked at the photograph in storage. When we got there, Carreres Llopis first measured the photographic print, 45.5 by 61 cm. She then analyzed and documented its condition with the help of an electronic handheld microscope Dino-Lite (fig. 5–9). The technique was gelatin silver print, where a gelatin layer holds the silver that forms the image on the top of the paper. The paper had a plastic feel to it and no individual fibers were visible, meaning that it was resin coated. RC paper, as it is called in the field, is comprised of a paper core coated with polyethylene resin. The identification was done by comparing the object to ID charts at Graphic Atlas.[8] This was to be expected from the period, as resin-coated paper came into production in the 1970s.[9] Further information, such as damage and degradation, were also extracted with the help of the Dino-Lite and other magnifying instruments. Carreres Llopis even found a fingerprint engrained in the surface of the gelatin (fig. 10). Sadly, we did not find out who left it there. We were able to determine that the photograph is “an original” in the sense that it likely came from Lebeck and wasn’t an unauthorized reprint. We were able to determine this by looking at the back of the photograph (fig. 11) where a yellow sticker says, “Robert Lebeck 2 Hamburg 56, Achtern Sand 30, Tel. 81 53 93,” accompanied by what seems to be Lebeck’s signature. The analysis and the identification of photographic materials and techniques helped me and Carreres Llopis to corroborate that this photographic print was produced during the photographer’s lifetime, as also determined by the yellow label. As the image was captured in 1960 and the material characteristics of the print tell us that it is printed on resin-coated paper and thus after 1970, it is reasonable to date the print as being after 1970.
Fig. 11. Robert Lebeck, Leopoldville (back), 1960, gelatin silver print, 45.5 × 61 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
In the end we were unable to identify how the Stedelijk acquired the photograph. Even though this question remains unanswered, a lot of good has come from this research. By diving into the history of this photograph we were able to highlight an important part of history that has been tucked away in the photography collection of the museum. While the photograph is so famous, it had not been known that is was part of the collection. Furthermore, this research has shown that an interdisciplinary approach is fruitful. By combining two different ways to approach and research an artwork, namely archival/historical and material/technical, we gathered information we would not have found separately. It is important to continue to call for collaborations between archival/historical researchers and technical researchers as it opens a vast array of possibilities.
We would like to thank all our supervisors and people involved in this research who made it possible.
Thanks to Frank van Lamoen and Tamara Klopper of the Curatorial Practice & Research department who encouraged and gave great advice during this research.
Thanks to the Paper Conservation department, the use of the Dino-Lite was possible because of Soji Chou. And thanks to paper conservator Monica Marchesi for her valuable contributions and advice for this research log.
Janne van den Bergh is a student in the research master Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this she finished a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences, with a focus on Humanities. Through her work and research, she focuses on decolonizing and queering the archive and the museum. She completed an internship at the department of Curatorial Practice & Research for the photography collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She mainly focused on highlighting themes such as resistance, engagement, and feminism as well as implementing collection evaluation, and researching new forms of collection management.
Ana Carreres Llopis is a master student in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Universitat Politècnica De València, Spain. She has been trained to care for contemporary art collections with a special focus on photographic materials and paper-related artworks. Recently, she had the opportunity to develop her career in conservation thanks to the Erasmus Program. She was an intern at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she focused on museum practices and the exhibition of objects. Prior to this, she interned at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, where she focused on the preservation of photographic materials in various aspects.
[1] Robert Lebeck and Fritz Kempe, TOKIO, MOSKAU, LEOPOLDVILLE: Robert Lebeck Reportagefotos Aus 3 Erdteilen, booklet, 1962, 1–2.
[2] Mark Sealy, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence and Wishart Limited, 2019), 168.
[3] Sealy, Decolonising the Camera, 168.
[4] Ibid, 11.
[5] Nakamori, Yasufumi. Cover endorsement. Sealy, Decolonising the Camera
[6] Sealy, Decolonising the Camera, 177
[7] Ibid., 179
[8] “Choose a Process – Identification,” Graphics Atlas.
[9] Rosina Herrera Garrido, Conservación y Restauración de Fotografía (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2022), 71.
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