The Goethe Institute of Dakar is paying homage to the German photographer Herbert List. The exhibition is composed of 100 photographs.

Herbert List was born in 1903, in a family of traders. In the framework of his training within the family company of coffee importation, he travels to different countries in South America, producers of coffee. He is 20 when he produces his first images with the help of a large format camera obscura. Encouraged by Anreas Feininger, student of the Bauhaus, he began to truly start photography in 1930, and made his first instamatics with his Rolleiflex. The desertification of cultural life in Germany and the « Nuremberg laws » set in place by the national socialist regime, that made of him a « jew of mixed blood », incited him to leave home and country in 1936. He then lived in London, Paris and Athens and worked as a photographer.

In Greece, he worked on a book project « Licht über Hellas » (Light on Greece), that he hopes to have published by the publishers Arts et Métiers. The invasion of Greece by the German troops in 1941 obliges him to leave the country. He settles in Munich. The war finishes, and he produces a reportage on the destruction of the city : surrealist images that inspire in him the esthetique of the temple ruins of Greece that he photographed.

In 1950, he returns to Greece. He travels this time around the north of the country, up to Mont Athos. His photographic language is modified during the 1950s : in response to the spirit of the times, List concentrates from then on on the observation of people.

In 1952, he joins Magnum agency and shoots portraiture of personalites and artists in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Greece. List is the author of several collections on photography, including certain ones that were published. Herbert List died in 1975 in Munich. His photographic heritage is handled by Michael Scheler (Hamburg) and by the Photography Department of the Stadtmuseum/Fotomuseum of Munich.

Through June 24

Goethe-Institut Senegal
Dakar/Point E
rue djourbel angle Piscine Olympique