'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 sixtyfour 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.'

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).