Photographer who showed Austria’s revival dies at 95
AUSTRIAN JEWISH photographer Erich Lessing, whose work chronicled reconstruction and revolution in postwar Europe, died last week at the age of 95.
He was best known for his definitive photographs capturing the cheering crowds as the Austrian State Treaty — which restored the country’s independence in May 1955 — was presented from the balcony of Vienna’s Belvedere Palace.
His work from that day is seared into Austria’s national consciousness and shaped it as a moment of pride and collective jubilation.
Born in Vienna in 1923, Lessing fled to Haifa by boat in 1939 with the help of Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem. In Palestine, he worked as a taxi driver and then a carp breeder on a kibbutz before joining the British Army. His mother and grandmother, who remained in Austria, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Lessing returned to Austria in 1947. Having dabbled in photography in Palestine as a kindergarten and beach photographer, he first found work as a photojournalist for the Associated Press and, beginning in 1951, the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos.
Described by the novelist Julya Rabinowich as the “doyen of Austrian photography”, his black-and-white images encapsulated both the stark and shabby realities of life in Austria and the gradual return to normality in the years following the Second World War, as the country rebuilt itself under Allied occupation.
After 1951, his work took him into the eastern bloc, where Lessing witnessed optimism and destruction in Hungary’s 1956 revolution and such esoteric events as “Miss Sopot,” a beauty contest in communist Poland. A 1956 photograph shows a family marking their son’s bar mitzvah in Krakow, at a time when only 3,000 Jews remained in the city and the community had no rabbi.
A photographer on film sets such as The Sound of Music and portrait artist for world leaders like Nikita Khrushchev, Golda Meir, and Charles de Gaulle, Lessing said of his life’s work: “I never thought of myself as doing anything other than telling stories.”
With Lessing’s passing, the world has lost not only an “outstanding and multifaceted artist,” Vienna Jewish community president Oskar Deutsch said, but also “an extraordinary human being, a contemporary witness, and a keen observer” of the world.