How Lehnert & Landrock’s haunting North Africa images speak to an AI age

The desert has always held a peculiar grip on human imagination—it’s not about what is there, but rather about what is absent. It’s a vast expanse of silence and shifting light, at once both barren and mystifying. To travellers, artists, and writers of the early 20th  century, the Sahara and North Africa seemed to slow time, offering solitude but also revelation into a life unseen by European eyes. And then, in 1904, two men arrived with their cameras.

When Rudolf Franz Lehnert, a Czech-born photographer with a restless eye, met Ernst Heinrich Landrock, a German businessman, more than 120 years ago in Tunis, it was a fateful partnership. Lehnert had trained in art and photography, Landrock had an instinct for publishing and distribution. Together they built a studio that married artistry to commerce, selling photographs as prints, albums, and, most successfully, postcards. For a Europe hungry for visions of the exotic “Orient”, their work arrived like dispatches from another world. They were not simply documenting the environment around them. They were producing images that would shape how people ­imagined this part of Africa. A century later their work remains both admired and contested, emblematic of a period when photography operated at the intersection of art, commerce, and colonial power.

It was Lehnert who supplied the artistic vision. His photographs ranged from desert landscapes and village scenes to staged portraits of women in traditional dress and street life in Tunis and Cairo. Landrock provided the business structure, ensuring their work reached audiences eager for insights of this curious world. Their postcards became popular souvenirs, reproducing a vision of North Africa filtered through European eyes.

The production of their images was laborious. Photographic equipment was heavy and cumbersome, glass plates fragile, and chemical processes unreliable. Each image demanded careful planning and long exposure times. In an era long before digital cameras and instant editing, Lehnert’s practice required a patience and discipline that underscores the technical achievement of the resulting archive. That sense of effort and craft is part of what makes their photographs stand apart today, when the production and distribution of ­images has become almost instantaneous.

By the 1920s, Lehnert & Landrock had relocated to Cairo, where their studio became a fixture of the city’s cultural and commercial life. Their reputation grew, though their work also began to face challenges. Shifts in artistic taste, combined with the political and social pressures of colonial rule, altered the reception of their images. During the Second World War, their archive of thousands of ­negatives was nearly destroyed. Its survival, due to persistence and circumstance, has left historians with an invaluable record of the period. Because Landrock was German, the British authorities in Cairo seized the company and its collection of glass-plate negatives and for years, the work of Lehnert and Landrock lay in limbo. Only after the war did Landrock succeed in reclaiming the archive, rescuing the fragile images from oblivion and ensuring their survival as a record of both artistry and cultural memory. Many of these negatives are now preserved in collections and have been digitised for research and exhibition.

Their legacy still lives on in downtown Cairo, as the oldest foreign-owned bookshop in Africa. Since 1939, the shop has been managed by the Lambelet family, descendants of Landrock. Today it functions both as a bookshop and a gallery, showcasing original glass-plate negatives and photographs. 

The relevance of Lehnert & Landrock in 2025 lies not only in their historical importance but in the contrast they offer to contemporary culture. Today, a smartphone can produce dozens of photographs in seconds. AI can generate convincing scenes of deserts, markets, or courtyards with a simple prompt. The slowness and deliberation required of early photographers throws our current abundance of images into sharp relief. Their photographs remind us of a time when making an image required patience and craftsmanship.

At the same time, their legacy is complex. Scholars have pointed out that Lehnert’s staged portraits, particularly of women, often reinforced stereotypes and fed into orientalist fantasies popular in Europe. Some images cross into voyeurism, presented as ethnographic but constructed to satisfy some kind of prerequisite expectations. To view their archive uncritically would be to ignore the colonial context in which it was produced. Their work demonstrates how ­photography can shape perceptions as much as it records realities.

Examining their photography again today also drives us to consider who gets to represent them and why. Even in its earliest forms, the camera was never a neutral observer. Lehnert & Landrock’s images may have captured a place and time with remarkable beauty, but they also reflect the asymmetries of power between subject and photographer, East and West. Their work challenges us to examine both what is in the frame and what was left out in our own day, when discussions about cultural appropriation, representation, and authenticity are becoming increasingly pressing.

This duality—beauty coupled with distortion, documentation paired with construction—is precisely why their work continues to matter. In an era when Instagram filters and AI image generators flatten cultural specificity into familiar patterns, the photographs of Lehnert & Landrock serve both as caution and inspiration. They show how visual media can enchant and mislead, how craft can elevate even staged images, and how archives can outlast the circumstances of their creation.

For collectors and institutions today, Lehnert & Landrock’s work carries a different form of value. Their photographs, once sold as postcards, now command significant prices at auction. Albums are treated as rare objects of cultural history. What was once commercialism has become part of global heritage, a reminder that the value of art is about how long it endures and relates across generations. 

Their photographs embody both the limitations and the achievements of their era. They speak to the power of photography as a medium that is never neutral, always shaped by its maker’s perspective and its audience’s expectations. And in a time when images can be produced infinitely and consumed instantly, they remind us of a different model: one where craft, patience, and deliberate vision gave each frame its weight. That may be Lehnert & Landrock’s most enduring legacy.