A Year and A Day. Un an et un jour

Leonore Mau traveled for almost two decades with the writer Hubert Fichte to research Afrodiasporic religions. Her photographs remained largely unpublished. They present us with challenges: What does it mean to look at them today—after debates about representation and the treatment of artistic ethnographic photographs? As a case study, A Year and A Day focuses on Mau's pictures taken in Haiti in the 1970s during the Duvalier dictatorship. The title refers to the cosmology of Vodou, according to which souls live under water for a year and a day before rebirth. Artists and scientists delve deeper into the historical background and shed light on Haiti in the 1970s, the relationship between Germany and Haiti, the photography of rituals, and the ethics of taking picture and looking. Leonore Mau (1916–2013) began taking photographs in Hamburg in the 1950s. From the 1960s she lived and traveled with the writer Hubert Fichte (1935–1986).