Karl-Hartmut Lerch was born in 1949 in Bolheim, Germany. He grew up in Cologne, where at the age of twenty he participated in his first film project for West German television (WDR). He trained in photography and began working as an assistant producer to young German filmmakers (notably Hans W. Geißendörfer). In 1971, he went to the University of Television and Film in Munich (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen).  He then lived in Paris for a number of years where he attended classes by Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss before graduating with a University Diploma in Cinematography from the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne-Panthéon, at the Institut Michelet d'Art et Archéologie with Jean Rouch and Dominique Noguez: Periodicity in Time and Space. Five years later, he published his thesis Les histoires du cinéma: (au revoir des yeux, la projection de la vision) [1].

In 1980, his work Portraying Booth was presented in the “Experimental Cinema” section of the Paris Biennial of the National Museum of Modern Art, and in 1981, he created a video installation produced by the Centre Pompidou: Kopf. The installation was a montage of thousands of photograms taken over a period of three months inside the Centre Pompidou. The two artists made visitors to the Centre Pompidou pose so that they could get a kind of portrait of the entire human race.

This work (and its video version Portrait, 1984) was later presented in a number of well-known institutions: the Smithsonian Institution, Washington (1985), the Paris Museum of Modern Art (1986), the Walker Hill Art Center, Seoul (1991), the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris (1992), the National Museums of Modern Art in Tokyo and Kyoto (1996), as well as at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2003).
During the 1980s, he worked in Paris, and later in Bavaria, New York and Treviso in painting, sculpture, and media workshops.

In the early 1990s, he produced a video installation with Hermann Kleinknecht: Einleitung einer Einleitung (Introduction to Memory). It was presented at the Multimediale 4 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1995, and then in 1998 at the Badischer Kunstverein, also in Karlsruhe, within the framework of Die Unruhe und die Zufriedenheit oder die Tragödie des Scheiterns (Agitation and Satisfaction or the Tragedy of Failure) exhibition. This installation used five screens to question the history of Germany and its violence.

After a detour into 3D computer animation with De Anima (produced with Christine Z. Chang in 1994), he returned to video and produced Adidasopera in 1996/1997, and The Monster in 2000.

Emilie Benoit

[1] Karl-Hartmut Lerch, Les histoires du cinéma: (au revoir des yeux, la projection de la vision) [The Histories of Cinema: (Farewell to Eyes, the Projection of Vision)], Thesis, Univ. Paris I, Paris, 1986, 216 pp.