WANTED: LEANDER BAERENZ

Dear friend,
Today’s newsletter starts with a little bit of history: It is 12 years ago since I took my first picture from a ladder of a person lying on the ground. It was a boy riding on the back of a dog, the starting point for my ‘Dreams of Flying’ series. The coming years would see plenty of photos by myself but also by other photographers that were loosely or heavily inspired by that work – mostly very sweet and innocent but also a few disrespectful  and commercially abusive of my intellectual property. Yes!!! What annoyance! So I thought I had to fight them: There were legal cases with Amazon, Levi’s, Décathlon and even a super award winning video by Coldplay was based on my images (we received best proof from a good inside spy!). Then, suddenly, there was one copy cat who beat them all…

His name is Leander Baerenz, a ruthless, super efficient and highly successful stock photographer. He apparently teamed up with some of the greatest art directors and a network of over 100 picture stock libraries across the globe. He has photographed many many hundred simple yet strong royalty free illustrations of my very own visual ideas. Dream images and concepts for all sorts of graphic designers, picture editors and art directors to work with. In only a few years he flooded the image market with a constant flow of the most demanded yet state of the art image content. He is great fun and I am his biggest fan! You might wonder why?

Because he is my own trick and revenge: I invented him to fight against all my other copy cats and in order to monopolise the main stream image market with images taken on the floor (weird concept – I agree!). ‘Leander Baerenz’ is one of my funniest and most critical projects to date. Instead of wasting time discussing bureaucratic matters on copyright or even taking people to court, I preferred producing much more work and having a ball with my friends in my studio. So please welcome Mister Leander Baerenz and his universe of images! THANKS for all the extra commissions through him and also THANKS for all the support from the photo community who sent him hate mails for copying me. You are all GREAT!! I have all respect for you!!
Important: Leander Baerenz is innocent and non-existent. YO! I take all the blame and joy for it! See some more work here!BOOK PREVIEW

After having successfully clarified the most pressing questions about puberty and the human brain, for our new book project with Thienemann-Esslinger Verlag, we turned our attention to another quite intriguing topic – RELIGION. The latest addition to our growing question-book series is going to be published this Autumn and will shed some light on real important questions like: ‘why are cows holy?’, ‘what are protestants protesting for?’, ‘how long is eternity?’ and ‘why is Buddha actually so fat?’. More coming soon!

HAUS LEO WORKSHOP