This book has been a long time in the making. It was on a road trip across the United States in the early l950’s that Erich Hartmann first saw the expanse and fertility of the country’s heartland. Later that year an assignment from the Pillsbury Company took him to Centralia Kansas to photograph the young winner of a baking contest. There he developed a friendship with the girl’s family, particularly her father, Leonard Harden, an independent farmer of seed wheat, and returned that autumn to photograph his harvest. Impressed with Harden’s quiet devotion to his work, his land and crops, he wrote “I became aware of the dignity which touches the many whose work makes bread available and of the meaning which bread can have for us all”. From this grew a desire to comment on this with his camera, a project he pursued over the next several years.
In his travels on assignments through those years he found people and situations that added to this photographic project. On a family car trip across the U.S. in l959 the children and I stayed in Denver for a few days while Erich traveled with a group of combine harvesters north with the harvest. In 1961 he spent six days on a “tow” of barges full of grain down the Mississippi River .In Europe and the Middle East he found and photographed tillers of the earth, planters, harvesters and sellers, Grain merchants, Bakers and sellers of bread and everywhere consumers of daily bread. Grain sellers in a Bedouin market Consumers of bread for daily sustenance and in celebration of a festival. In Israel he photographed tillers of the land and planters of seed. He photographed bakers in Paris, in New York, In Jerusalem , , millers in Minneapolis and rural France ,sellers , and consumers of bread everywhere adding to the people who help provide our bread in varied cities of the world .
By 1962 he organized and designed an exhibition of over one hundred photographs of this project which Pillsbury presented at the International Food Conference at the Coliseum in New York that subsequently traveled throughout the United States.
Efforts to produce a book of these photographs, which had been Erich’s original intent for the project proceeded through the next ten or more years. These efforts always came up against Erich’s desire to have this a poetic tribute, a lyric reflecting his respect and admiration for all planters and growers of wheat, for the makers and bakers and consumers of bread.
Publishers wanted the material but they wanted it as a documentary, an inclusive record of bread from seed to table and wanted to impose their own format and content, entirely different from the tone of the photographs and not at all the message Erich wished to convey. Various people were invited to write texts, none suited Erich except for one which he wrote, which he feared was redundant and a much shorter one by me.
No one seemed to understand or wish to publish Erich’s photographs as a lyrical personal tribute to all those who help provide Our Daily Bread. What they wanted was a documentary record of . This was entirely different from the the tone and of the photographs and not at all the personal message he wished to convey in a book. He rejected one publisher after another and even returned one publisher’s advance. Year passed until one day came the news that all the huge panels of the exhibit itself had been destroyed in a fire at its storage place in Minnesota.
Erich was by then convinced that he had to be satisfied with the success of his exhibit, that a book would never happen, and turned his energies to other projects. The idea of a book was put aside until the autumn of 2012 when in the south of France, through Anna Patricia Kahn, Erich Hartmann’s Estate representative and galerist , I met Klaus Kehrer who agreed to publish the book as it existed in photographs and with my short text pieces set among the appropriate photographs.
So, here it is, almost sixty years after its inception and many years after his death, Erich Hartmann’s “Our Daily Bread”, is a tribute to the people in its photographs who willingly gave him a glimpse of their lives and of their work in producing their and our daily bread.
© Ruth Bains Hartmann, 2013
Our Daily Bread
by Erich Hartmann
Kehrer Verlag (On December 5th, 2013)
144 pages
32,6 x 23,8 x 2,2 cm
English
ISBN-10: 386828446X
ISBN-13: 978-3868284461
49,90€
Anna-Patricia Kahn
Galerie °CLAIR
Saint-Paul-de-Vence / Munich
Our Daily Bread
Erich Hartmann
From November 28th 2013 to February 28th, 2014
Französischer Dom am Gendarmenmarkt
Berlin-Mitte
Germany
Exhibition “Our daily bread” is under the patronage of UNICEF and ANNE FRANK Fund Basel and initiated and directed by °Clair, Curator Anna-Patricia Kahn
http://www.clair.me
