Black and white pictures went out of fashion after the war. The glass plates Lehnert had exposed between 1904 and 1930 were stored in a corner of the shop and forgotten, hidden, as Dr. Edouard Lambelet later wrote, under a cloud of fine Egyptian dust.
Edouard joined his father Kurt in the business in 1979. Three years later he realised that a treasure was waiting to be rediscovered. Between 1983 and 1984 he cleaned and sorted hundreds of plates, most of them 18 × 24 cm, from the Tunisian period. An old laboratory and a photographer who had worked in the field as a young man were at his disposal; the first prints were made under the most archaic conditions, on outdated paper.
From Libération to Lausanne
In November 1984 the writer Philippe Cardinal published an article in the French daily Libération that inspired many other photography enthusiasts. In 1985 many of the plates were deposited at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, and in December the first exhibition opened in Paris: Lehnert & Landrock, Tunisian Period, 1904–1914. Lehnert's daughter Eliane, living in Uzès, saw it and handed the bookshop a few photographs of her father.
Every print we sell today descends from that work: the inter-negatives made from the plates, printed in our own workshop, stamped and numbered on the back.