Photographer: Lehnert & Landrock (Rudolf Franz Lehnert und Ernst Heinrich Landrock).
Title: untitled (Jeunes Arabes).
Date: circa 1910.
Country: Tunisia.
Medium: gelatin silver print.
Size: 17,8 x 23,7 cm (image 16,7 x 22,7 cm) .
Condition: very good.
Reference: LLI0919/1.
Provenance: French collection.
Extra: Lehnert & Landrock credit stamp in the negative with archive number 148. Verso stamped note 'Copyright by Lehnert & Landrock, Tunis. The authors of unlawful reproductionwill be prosecuted'.
Lehnert & Landrock was a photographic studio run by Rudolf Franz Lehnert (1878-1948, born in Grossaupa, Bohemia and trained at the Vienna institute of graphic Arts) and Ernst Heinrich Landrock (1878-1966, born in Rainsdorf, Saxony, and business partner) active in Tunisia and Egypt in the early 20th century, noted for producing Orientalist images. Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock produced images of North African people, landscapes, and architecture for a primarily European audience. These images were mainly distributed in monographs, though also as original prints, photogravures, and lithographic postcards.
Landrock met Lehnert in Switzerland. His admiration for Lehnert's photography lead them to establish a photographic business in Tunis in the early twentieth century – around 1910. The business proved successful, though it was temporarily suspended when Lehnert was interned during the First World War. In the 1920s they resumed their work in Cairo, at 44 Sharia Street. They listed themselves as postcard publisher's rather than photographers, presumably so they could concentrate on the romaticized images of the Middle East that they prefered to produce. These they published as postcards, larger souvenir photographs for albums and as reproductions in books. In 1930, Lehnert seems to have returned to Tunis, opening a studio independently at 43, Avenue Jules-Ferry. In 1985, over forty years after Lehnert had retired to Carthage in 1939 and Landrock had retired to Germany, their collection of negatives were given to the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne.