Barbara Stauss
Mare, the German reportage magazine, has just celebrated its 60th edition. Mike Stanton talks to Barbara Stauss, its inspirational photo director, about how her life has influenced Mare's alternative view of the world.
Barbara Stauss reaches over to her collection of Mare back issues and pulls out No.33, from August/September, 2002.
To mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York, Mare published a series of photo narratives of the city from an angle that few would chose. The result was startling.
Sitting at her desk in Mare's tranquil Berlin offices, she tries to explain the how the magazine chooses its stories, its way of seeing.
The cover image, the Statue of Liberty poking through a grainy, sepia haze, gives no more than a suggestion of the sea, the magazine's over-arching theme.
Mare did not want to ape the angle of most articles about New York at that time. Not doing the obvious is one of the magazine's guiding principles.
“We discovered that the World Trade Centre was owned by the Port Authority, which is like a second state in New York,” she says. “It owns all the bridges, tunnels and transport terminals, and even has its own police force. So we chose to show the city from this point of view.”
Photographer Robert Voit was sent New York to take images of everything owned by the Authority, and a text was developed afterwards.
“Remember, this was just one year after 9/11, the photographer faced enormous problems taking pictures with his large format camera. Passers by yelled at him and he was even arrested by the Port Authority police.”
Slowly, Mare constructed a kind of alternative picture of the city, one that often remains hidden, even to its residents. One story centred on the tiny Hart Island where New York's dead, orphan babies are buried by prisoners from another island. The burial ground is known as the “baby trench”.
“Normally, people can't get to the Island, but because photographer Joel Sternfeld had done a book about the Island, we were allowed to use the images,” says Barbara.
“This [practice] is still happening. People don't know about it even those who know New York well.”
Mare has a reputation for taking surprising and slightly skewed views of the world. The brainchild of Nikolaus K Gelpke, the publisher, and Zora Del Buono, chief culture editor, Mare was first conceived as a news magazine, but before launching was drawn towards a very different tone.
“We had in mind the Swiss magazine, Du,” says Barbara, who has been in charge of picture editing from the beginning.
“The intention is to look at the world from the sea. After all, three-quarters of the earth is sea. We try to avoid showing the sea, but still tell stories about the sea. Can you imagine how much repetition there would be if we always showed the sea?”
In putting together an issue on Sex and the sea, Barbara had seen a picture story about sex workers in harbour cities. But she had no text. However, her colleague, Zora had text from someone who describes sailors on a cargo ship longing for arrival in ports so they can have sex with prostitutes. The stories did not match, but when they were combined they made a powerful feature.
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© Antoine d`Agata/ Magnum
There is a studied quietness to Mare that is nurtured by its photo director. Barbara Stauss grew up in Zurich in the Seventies and Eighties the daughter of photographer Niklaus Stauss. She recalls that images were always part of her life.
“We even had a dark room in the kitchen. My father gave me a body and lens when I was young, and I took pictures of landscapes when we are on holiday.
“He made me a photo album of pictures he had taken of me and it was really good photography, not like everybody else's with underexposed images where the people are really small. And he put one of my pictures in it. It was a picture of a row of poplar trees and he took one of me taking the picture to put in the album.”
Understandably perhaps, being the daughter of a famous local photographer, photography began to take a backseat in favour of other interests such as languages and in particular, Russian.
She spent four months in Russia, but by 1988 she found herself in West Berlin, a time and a place that was to influence Barbara deeply.
“It was before the Wall came down. It was a very dark place, cold and cheap, the opposite of Zurich. It attracted people who didn't want to conform. I was drawn to this atmosphere of the underground and the avant-garde. I was 20 and like a lot of people that age I wanted melancholy and to suffer.”
She liked writing and the arts in general, but she began to feel the pull of photography. “It was playful and democratic. I started to use colour filters, experimenting, very different to my father's work.”
In her late teens, Barbara's mother gave her Nan Goldin's The Ballard of Sexual Dependency.
“This gave me an insight into a total different world, a very profound, sometimes unhealthy, world. But I was growing up and able to look in places that perhaps I wouldn't have found by myself.
“Goldin gave herself so much to the world - self-portraits of her after she had been beaten by her boyfriend. Very shocking, but I thought 'what a woman!' People normally hide these things, but she was showing them to the world.”
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© Antoine d`Agata/ Magnum
Considering her current job, it is perhaps fitting that her first assignment after she graduated was three weeks as a photographer on a cruise ship in the North Sea. “It was terrible, a lesson in how you bother people with your camera ' forcing them to stand still. I didn't like it and I knew I didn't want to do this type of photography.”
Soon after she helped to produce a brochure for an AIDS campaign in which she took pictures of a deaf friend translating the words into sign language. There was, at the time, a particularly high proportion of infection among the deaf, gay community.
She followed this by becoming an assistant for renowned Canadian video artist Stan Douglas.
But it was in her job as an archivist in a Berlin agency, editing and classifying thousands of images, that she found the environment most suited to her, and one that was to influence her work at Mare.
“I want images to tell a story. Sometimes a tremendously good image needs to go for the sake of a story. Sometimes an image can be too good, giving too much information on its own. The best image is the one you create with many images.”
This search for the “essence” of a photo narrative is what drives her work.
In a Joop Swaart masterclass for World Press Photo in 2006, she worked with Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso.
His narrative was about Sandjak, a town that had been divided between Serbia and Montenegro since 1912. In both areas, Sandjak is populated mainly by Bosnians - most of whom, in Montenegro, voted for the country's independence in 2006. There had been mass emigration from Sandjak since the 1950s. A number of Sandjak emigrants were returned by Western European authorities after the fall of the Milosevic regime. Returnees face a bleak future with few job opportunities. Had it not been for aid organisations working to stimulate the economy, Sandjak could be the scene of a new wave of ethnic conflict.
Barbara explains how she edited the images from 18 down to nine.
“We tried to create a certain atmosphere, a mood. This was not created by one image alone, but by putting nine of them together in three rows of three. The color in the nine images plays a major role.
“The edit shows that you can miss out certain, even important, aspects of a story, but you gain an essence. With this reduction to 'biblical images', we were able to create what the photographer intended: a well-rounded, solid and emotional compilation from a seemingly heterogenous mix of images, and this is what I truly wanted."
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Final Edit. See showcase for the complete gallery.
In the end, Mare is what it wants to be, often surprising, sometimes not.
Her message to photographer is a simple one. “Photographers need to have an idea of what they want to say, but it doesn't have to be intellectual or travelling the world. Look out for the details, look at your local area. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed as people, wanting to be part of this big world. Do something quiet. Mare is a very quiet.”