29 Magical Doorways That Connect Two Locations, Dimensions, or Points in Time, with footnotes
Kloster Chorin and Lehnin, 1930s-40's
Photograph
23 x 16 cm
Private collection
Lehnin Abbey (German: Kloster Lehnin) is a former Cistercian monastery in Lehnin in Brandenburg, Germany. Founded in 1180 and secularized during the Protestant Reformation in 1542, it has accommodated the Luise-Henrietten-Stift, a Protestant deaconesses’ house since 1911. The foundation of the monastery in the newly established Margraviate of Brandenburg was an important step in the high medieval German Ostsiedlung; today the extended Romanesque and Gothic brickstone buildings, largely restored in the 1870s, are a significant part of Brandenburg’s cultural heritage. More on Lehnin Abbey
Born in Gunzburg an der Donau in 1898, Max Baur was instantly captivated by the natural landscapes of his local surroundings — in particular the land around the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam.
Baur’s first monograph was published in 1937, and after moving his family to the south of Germany in an effort to escape the worst of the war, he opened an ‘atelier of photography’ in 1953. From this point his work grew more expansive, as he began to document German cities and buildings with the same serene eye he applied to his natural landscapes.
Baur was reproachful of the label ‘photographer,’ preferring instead to describe himself as a ‘painter of light.’ Taking just the briefest look at his work, as petals dance brightly off the surface and trees develop a crisply shadowed frame, it is not difficult to see why. More on Max Baur