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"I grew up in an art-conscious parental home.
My grandfather was a sought-after landscape
artist of the Düsseldorf School. As a result, there
were beautiful paintings everywhere in the house,
including two large portraits of my great-grandparents
from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
which made a lasting impression on me as a
boy. So it´s not surprising that, as a high-school
graduate, I photographed with my first 35 mm
camera on the first film a face, my own, a selfportrait.
That was in 1954.
After that, photography didn´t let me go. So,
in the sixty-four years until this day, I have recorded,
among my other topics, over four hundred
human faces, above all those of family members
and friends. I had studied geology and had become
a geologist, which meant making endless
journeys all over the world and also inevitably
making countless human contacts. So I could
also photograph human faces over and over
again in all the visited countries. As a geologist,
I usually only met people living in the countryside
such as farmers, shepherds, fishermen or
innkeepers, but hardly a city dweller.
With the help of the camera, I have tried to
capture the many expressive possibilities of the
human face, understanding that every face is
unmistakable.
I have experimented with various camera models
and film types of analogue photography, but
I said goodbye to them in 2014 in order to get to
know and to use the almost inexhaustible possibilities
of digital photography, most recently using
a monochrome Leica. I have, however, remained
as faithful as possible to one classical tool of photography:
the tripod."

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Ibbeken, Hillert
Until his retirement, Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been involved in architecture and landscape photography throughout his life. His book Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Das architektonische Werk heute / The architectural work today, edited in cooperation with Elke Blauert, was published by Edition Axel Menges in 2001. Later there followed, in the same format, this time with him as sole editor, his monographs on Ludwig Persius (2005) and Friedrich August Stüler (2006), and, among others, Schlösser der Weserrenaissance / Castles of the Weser Renaissance (2008), edited in cooperation with Michael Bischoff, as well as Das andere Italien / The other Italy. Geschichten und Bilder aus Ligurien und Kalabrien / Stories and pictures from Liguria and Calabria (2011). His last work published by Edition Axel Menges was Preußische Gärten / Prussian Gardens with his photographs and a historical overview by Katja Schoene (2013).

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