The man who travels faster than jet lag: from Karl Lagerfeld’s fashion show to Robert Frank’s Canadian solitude with legendary publisher GERHARD STEIDL.
By ALEX RÜHLE

The phone isn’t quite to my ear when a voice crackles: “Gersteidlforaxrühle.” “Excuse me?” Annoyed the voice repeats: “Gerhard Steidl for Alex Rühle.” Steidl! Fantastic, finally. But is it his secretary calling to patch him through? What’s with the slurred mishmash? In the few seconds of perplexed silence the voice seems to be loosing patience fast: “Hello!?!” “Oh it’s you yourself? Good morning Mr. Steidl.” “Good. You can come. I’m leaving on Wednesday, we will be back midday Friday.” “Oh, wonderful. But … you want to fly to Canada on Wednesday and be back here midday Friday?” Steidl ignores the question: “Do you have a sleeping bag?” “Yes.” “Sleeping pad?” “Yes.” “Frank’s place is beautiful but it’s a ramshackle hut.” Camping in back of Robert Frank’s house, under a Canadian sky in July! Bears! Atlantic breakers! And only a few meters behind you in a gray-green fishing house, a legend. What an image.

A week earlier a box appeared, printed with the words: “Robert Frank published by Steidl.” A small abstract briefly described the oeuvre, and once opened, the contents started falling out: early series from Paris and Peru, Jack Kerouac’s text on Pull My Daisy, and then, The Americans, the volume that changed the history of photography forever — 83 photographs that “for the first time gave shape to America’s formless, uninhabited existences,” writes photographer Joel Sternfeld. Frank drove through 48 states with a composed, skeptical, sometimes scathing and consistent gaze, and came back with 25,000 shots — photographs of the doomed in a decrepit land. A black priest in Mississippi kneeling on a cardboard box, performing strange rituals in the dawn light; commemoration ceremonies in New Jersey; jukeboxes in empty, glossed linoleum halls; boney, haggard faces on a New York bench; a black couple in San Francisco, the man staring lividly into the camera. Frank describes this picture as his favorite photograph, “’cause the man looked at me so aggressively: What do you want, stranger?”

Similarly aggressive was Frank’s foreign gaze as he traveled for two years through the States as a ternary outsider: as a Jew, as a Swiss immigrant who had only lived in the US for eight years, and as a New Yorker, who wanted to depict the huge country with his small Leica — “the grey film that captured the pink juice of human nature,” wrote Kerouac. In the last photograph you see a long street with a black car on the side of the road. Frank’s wife and his two small children stare, exhausted, through the windshield; the wife, he later divorced; the children, both long dead. Only the book lives on. It came out 50 years ago as a general attack on the image that America had made of itself. A vehement critic at the time wrote that the truncated, under-lit photographs, the wedged-in horizons, and banal motifs looked like a bunch of children’s photos developed on a street corner.

Working closely together with Frank, Gerhard Steidl has reprinted the book. The 84-year-old came to the publishing house in Göttingen, picked out the paper and cover, laid out the borders again, picture for picture, added two new photos, and chose a smaller format than the previous editions. But more importantly, for the last two years Gerhard Steidl has traveled every few weeks to New York or Mabou, Frank’s melancholy isolation from the world, four hours north of Halifax, in order to edit the work with the venerable artist himself — old material as well as the late films. You have to appreciate it, because Frank’s varied body of work has been almost tragically overshadowed by the The Americans. “He can’t look at the old stuff himself anymore,” said Steidl in front of the layout. “This time it’ll be interesting: four books, two early volumes, late Polaroids, and photos by his father. By the way, visiting Frank is a nice idea, but I suggest, for reasons of establishing the truth, that you come with me to Paris the day before. There you’ll see the bloody reality. There I earn the money that I throw out the window for Frank.”

It’s hot in the Grand Palais, and the Chanel backstage area smells like hairspray, plastic, and hormones. Steidl has made the trip with two coworkers, both trailing his every step. He speaks in curt commands: “Look for Sophie. Where’s Karl’s bag?” When asked what his job is, his assistant Frank Hertel answers: “To have time, to have a lot of time, to always have time.”

Ten minutes to go until the start of Karl Lagerfeld’s fall couture show. The models are perched lethargically, collapsed together like empty Tetrapak containers, fiddling with their cell phones. Even if you have your back to him, you know when Lagerfeld enters since everybody except the models turns in his direction like metal filings towards a magnet. Kisses flutter through the air and elastic limbs fly by each other.

Steidl makes his way arduously through the crowd until he’s standing directly in front of Lagerfeld, who, with an inscrutable face flips through the proof of a small volume of black-and-white photography, Abstract Architecture — lines, shade, windows, columns. The show could start at any moment, but for now the book is center stage.

Ten minutes later the girls look up from their distorted poses on the plastic stools and smile at the scenario, as if they are aware of the beauty amid such decadence. The sun shines through the glass roof, burning with curiosity like a goggling telephoto lens, every beam focusing on the gaunt models and the audience, who fan themselves with Steidl’s invitations. Steidl surveys them contentedly: “Who says a world without paper makes sense?”

Steidl spends eight to fifteen days a month working with Chanel, and is present at every one of Lagerfeld’s shoots. After the show, he rushes past Claudia Schiffer without a glance because he wants to show Lagerfeld’s assistants the proof of the new catalogue. Can he recognize a face well? “Not at all. I have a good memory for photos, paper, and snippets.” A little later he further demonstrates his people skills: at noon he has an appointment at the Chanel offices, but nobody’s there. The staff is probably celebrating the show with a good meal. “Never arrange to meet the French between noon and 3 pm,” he groans. “The way they go out to eat all the time could drive

you crazy.”

A chef was hired for his publishing house years ago. In How to Make a Book with Steidl, the internal handbook for prospective Steidl artists, the reason is stated under optimizing time management. “In the past, artists would always leave the building to eat, and we had to go looking for some of them hours later in the bars nearby. Now, nobody’s allowed to leave the building — food is prepared by our chef, Rüdiger Schnellong. I often imagine our building as a submarine: once everyone’s on board, we descend, and until the end of the journey, there will be neither fresh air nor daylight.”

Now the submarine captain is standing in the glaring Parisian sun, calling Göttingen, and his affinity for paper becomes even more clear: “Go into my office, up to my desk. On the left there’s a pile, next to it there are three plastic bags. The one in the middle is from Chanel; on top of it is Marie-Louise’s business card. Yes, I’m in a hurry.“

He’s in a hurry because Frank is waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic. A cursory look at the rest of his workday is like Virilio in motion. With a driver, Steidl makes six different stops to discuss six new projects. Among them is the catalogue for a double exhibition: “America-Pictures” from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, two contrasting figures in photography. Flipping through the tightly framed photos, you realize how scandalously new Frank’s pictures must have been back then; his wild snapshots look like they were taken from a moving vehicle.

Steidl moves through Paris like a human vector. He unremittingly transmits instructions to Göttingen and enthuses Lagerfeld, whom he convinced to cofound the publishing house 7L in 2000. Steidl is sitting inside the bookstore of 7L around 2 pm, showing a Chanel colleague the fall catalogue and chattering about the choices of paperweight, color, and elucidation. The man nods at everything rather carelessly, until finally Steidl says, “The paper. Smell it!” The colleague carefully circles his nose over the open catalogue. Steidl takes the book and sticks his nose deep into the binding, sucking in the air as if it’s a luscious extract. As he exhales, he states with a vacant face, “Beautiful.” A moment later, a bookstore employee hoofs over and says, “You know this is a public space. I’m a little …” “Yes,” decrees Steidl, “we’ll be ready in a minute.”

At 7 pm Steidl flies back to Göttingen in a private jet, reclining in his seat with a sleeping mask on and earplugs in even before the plan takes off.

The following morning the ICE leaves Göttingen at 5:50 am. Steidl has already spent two hours in the office preparing everything for his absence. Organizational instructions and handwritten notes hang on the printing press for the photo volume Movement by Guido Mocafico: “If it’s possible, we need to do three shifts on Sunday. Please sign in!” The presses will run non-stop for the next months, day and night. “The printing plan is set until the end of November, very tight. Not a single extra page will fit.”

***

A charming old fishing house, half sunken in the tall grass, with open windows taking in the Atlantic breeze. Robert Frank stands in front of the poplars that he planted himself, hands deep in his pockets, staring skeptically like the man in the San Francisco photo: “What do you want, stranger?” We have just arrived, our bodies still vibrating from the frantic travel mania, and Steidl says, “I have bad news. I have to leave tomorrow.” Frank mumbles, “At least this time you’re staying the night.”

Frank moved here at the end of the 1960s, away from the art world, away from noisy New York, away from glory. For nothing. Frank is a kind of recluse from photography; he wants nothing to do with reverence or image. Now, on the 50th anniversary of The Americans, the books, films, and exhibitions are innumerable. “How wearisome it is when people talk about writing a biography of Robert,” Frank’s wife, the painter June Leaf, says to Steidl. “It’s such an uncorrupt idea, to do it the way you do. To simply present as much of his work as possible.”

When Frank was driving through America, Steidl was five years old. He was a fat boy with a prescription to diet pills. He was a silent dunce, bad at school, and almost placed into special-ed before a doctor took him off the pharmaceuticals. But then he quickly became the best in his class. The son of a social worker, Steidl skipped two grades, finished school at seventeen, and started the publishing house in 1968. As he gives Frank the fall catalogue, Frank notices a small medallion-like anniversary sticker, looks into Steidl’s youthful face and says, “What? You’ve already been doing this for 40 years?” He then flips through the program, in which only a few of his own works appear. There’s a mixture of curiosity and dismay in his face as he says, “Oh, Polidori. Sturges … It must be fun publishing all these books.” He stops, his silent look grinding down on Lagerfeld’s flat, monotone model portraits.

As Frank notices the catalogue entry on Evans and Cartier-Bresson, he asks, “Did you ever meet Cartier-Bresson?” “We made three books together,” Steidl responds. “When I sent him the third one, he had been sick in bed for two days. His wife showed it to him, and as he flipped through it he said ‘well done,’ and then died.” Everyone had been expecting a friendly anecdote, and now death is in the room. After a few seconds of silence, Frank grimly smiles: “Well, that’s not going to happen here. Let’s work.”

They begin with a small box filled with seven booklets of Polaroids from recent years. Frank thumbs through with light hands, laughing: “It’s fun looking at this but I have no idea who would buy it.” “Who cares,” says Steidl. “But, for the third book, you wanted to photograph the red table.” “True.” Frank gets his Polaroid camera, takes a picture, and sets the camera on the old oven in the middle of the room. When he sees a nostalgic fog cloud the gaze of his visitors, he says, “Once Walker Evans came to visit in 1972. He sat here for three days waiting for the right light to photograph this oven. He was already a big deal photographer, but what an awful snob!” “Oh Robert,” his wife says, “Walker was wonderful.” Then Frank: “My wife is a hopeless peacenik, or even worse, a beatnik!“ – “Well, you’re a redneck!” – “I still think Evans was a snob. The way he always corrected you when you misspoke.” Frank switches from English to High German, through which Swiss German terms from his Precambrian life fall like Alpine boulders.

Later the two get to work in the large room. An oil painting hangs behind Frank — a coast, dunes, light colors. The painting was given to him in 1943 by the photographer Hermann Seegesser, one of his teachers in Zurich. “He must have sensed that I would leave. ‘This will remain part of you,’ he said. 1943! When I had no chance of getting out of Switzerland as a Jew.” The painting is one of the few things Frank took with him when he moved to New York in 1947.

Frank pushes through layers of sentiments on his desk: books, metal cases, on top of a pile rests a picture of a small boy with big dimples, wildly holding a flugelhorn. It’s his son Pablo, who was in the 1959 film Pull My Daisy. The raw, energetic, and surreal film wanted to throw the whole world to the wind.

Pablo killed himself in 1994. Frank’s daughter died in a plane crash in 1970. His later works are in part works of mourning – wild-grey skies, few people, scratched and broken materials. “Family,” says Frank, as he pushes away the pile with the smiling picture of Pablo. “Family is over.” Now it’s back again, as Steidl has developed Frank’s childhood: 515 paper reprints from glass-plate negatives, which

Frank’s father took in the early 1930s. Steidl found the negatives at Frank’s, under the bed, and coaxed him into it. And what about Customs? Don’t they say anything when Steidl travels back and forth with originals? “For black-and-white I always say they’re pictures of my father. For color I say they’re snapshots by me.”

Steidl shows Frank a proof of his 1952 book Black, White, and Things; it was the first example of Frank’s rebellion against the stolid uprightness of photography books at that time. “These goddamn stories with beginnings and ends,” he irately wrote. All these linear, moral photo essays trying to posit photography as a universal language “that everyone, even children, could understand.” His pictures hint at themes, rather than spelling them out. In the photo of black Spanish women processing in front of a chalk-smeared wall, you see poverty, religion, and aging. Or the relation between this picture and the next one, which shows three bankers hurrying through London. You can also enjoy the structural similarities or the photos’ remarkable grey air. They function like poetry, in that the act of showing actually conceals other things.

Frank flips through the proof, mute and hesitant; something’s not right. He fl ips back and forth almost morosely, as Steidl waits. Then, with awkward regret, Frank says, “Nice paper, well made, but I know now why I think it’s a weak book. The pictures are too big.” At that moment Steidl lays out another proof, one-third the size, in front of the perplexed Frank and says, “I thought so too. Way too coffee table.” Frank flips through the hand-sized copy, back and forth, back and forth, looking increasingly pleased. “This is good,” he snarls, “it’s got to be like this.” That must be Steidl’s secret. Having originally wanted to be a photographer, he acts as printer-and-publisher-in-one. “You have eyes,” Frank says, quoting Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans.

The few existing portraits of Steidl make him seem like an eccentric in a white coat. As if he were a highly skilled paper-pusher, he forgets to eat when he works too hard and spends all day scurrying through the narrow halls of the publishing house. It’s true; he is not a conciliatory man. Günter Grass once said that Steidl is a “Manchester capitalist, to whom some one taught manners.” But when you hear him on the phone with his employees, he often sounds gruff. All niceties are pushed aside, as if he were clearing off a desk with his forearm. One brief command and he’s already off the phone. You have to ask yourself which manners Grass was talking about.

However, here, during the almost osmotic work with Frank, in which line structure, paper type, fonts, and other details of the editions are calmly and amicably discussed for hours, you understand why artists wait in line outside his office without complaining. Because there is only one printing press, and Steidl has enough ambition to supervise every print sheet, you’ll just have to wait your turn. Joel Sternfeld comically describes the experience: “If you make a book with Steidl, it’s better if you stop taking yourself seriously as a photographer beforehand. Imagine you’re a pilot flying on the busiest day of the year, approaching New York. You know that you can’t land right away, so you begin circling in the holding pattern. When you run out of fuel, and are really in danger of crashing into the East River any second, then you can call him. Then he’ll take you down safely. When you arrive, you can be sure you’ll be the only plane. He will quickly refuel you, and in the end, you will come out with a brand new shimmering book in your hands.”

The airplane/airport metaphor fits well with Steidl’s frenetic traveling. Private jet, ICE, jumbo, rent-a-car; Paris-Göttingen-Frankfurt-London-Halifax-Mabou, all in 24 hours. After only one day with him, you feel like you’re moving faster than time. He flies more than 300,000 miles a year, and then there’s the “Road Jet,” an Audi in which the passenger and back seats have been replaced with a business-class plane seat that converts into a bed. “We tinted the windows too. It’s amazing for sleeping.” For amateurs, the whole experience has a kind of strobe light effect. Seeing double by the third day of the trip in Mabou, it’s as if my internal hard drive is full. The tranquil scenery of Nova Scotia is interrupted by hectic snapshots of Paris. As Frank sits at home, among invisible cobwebs of memory and irony, in front of a Coke bottle on the table, the image from 36 hours before of a waiter trailing bolt upright behind Karl Lagerfeld with nothing but a Coke bottle on his black tray reappears.

Finally, just after closing the proof of the fourth volume, the left lens falls out of Steidl’s brand new glasses. Even the glasses can’t keep up with this man’s workload. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon. Frank and Steidl have finished piecing together the book, and now it just needs to be printed. Blue air hangs over the bay during the short goodbye in the tall grass, and June Leaf tells Steidl he should at least drive down to the harbor. So he does, and stands like a suitcase between the green fishing nets and the sea. But only after a few moments, he has to go; another flight awaits him.

On Friday night, as the jet lag blows above Frank’s Canadian hut in search of the two Germans, they are already long gone. One is in the Road Jet on the way to Göttingen, getting ready to print all weekend long and to press forward, fast; the other is in the ICE train, where he falls into a coma-like sleep.