Lukas Einsele

Einsele was born in Essen in 1963. Working with photography, video, and text, he began the long-term project One Step Beyond — The Mine Revisited in 2001^*1. The project began shortly after the Mine Ban Treaty was signed in 1997 and entered into force in 1999, establishing international obligations around mine clearance and assistance to survivors. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines summarizes the treaty as prohibiting use, production, stockpiling, and transfer while also requiring clearance of contaminated areas and victim assistance^*2. One Step Beyond emerged at a moment when the international politics of banning the weapon ran alongside the ongoing lives of people already injured by it.

Einsele has described the project’s starting point in very specific terms. In an interview with medico international, he criticizes the way information about landmine survivors often circulates without names or personal histories, while injuries and missing body parts function almost as the primary proof that the person exists^*3. His question became what he could do as a photographer. Before approaching landmines as a problem of international politics, the project begins by asking whose face and story have disappeared.

The 2004–05 presentation at Witte de With combined a photographic exhibition with a website and public programs involving mine-clearance specialists, philosophers, and curators^*4. The project later expanded into books, international exhibitions, and educational and advocacy settings; medico also records that the photobook received the German Photo Book Award in 2006^*3. The project’s routes of circulation were designed to carry the issue beyond the museum. medico international also presented writing from the book within the campaign against landmines, showing the connection between exhibition, publication, and mine-ban advocacy ^*5.

Documenting Landmine Injury by Beginning with Faces and Names

The portraits in One Step Beyond shift the first piece of information from the injured body part to the face and name. In the medico international interview, Einsele criticizes the tendency to speak first about what a victim has lost and describes the project’s aim as showing the person^*3. Dakar/Bamako likewise describes One Step Beyond as an attempt to return from the statistical “victim” in charts and graphs to an individual human being^*6.

Using Large-Format Photography to Make Time for Consent

Each participant was photographed with a field camera and given a Polaroid afterward^*7. In a text on photographic collaboration, Einsele explains that the large-format camera is conspicuous and slow to prepare, allowing the agreement between photographer and subject to become part of the making of the image^*8. Conversation and waiting take place before and after exposure, producing a different temporality from fast reporting organized around a decisive moment. Giving the Polaroid to the participant also makes the result immediately shareable. A 2005 review in taz likewise records the large-format portraits, the Polaroids given to participants, testimony, diagrams of accident sites, and mine documentation as parts of a single procedure^*9.

Portraits, Testimony, Hand-Drawn Maps, and Weapons Data Carry Different Forms of Evidence

According to Bildmuseet’s exhibition text, participants recounted the circumstances leading to the accident, sketched the location, and were then photographed. In the exhibition, interviews, drawings, portraits, mine documentation, and photographs and texts about the region are shown together^*7. The photograph shows the person in the present; testimony reconstructs the time of the accident; the drawing maps remembered space; weapons documentation approaches the event from the side of manufacture. Materials with different evidentiary roles meet on the same wall.

Treating the Photographer’s Freedom of Movement as a Responsibility

In the medico international interview, Einsele notes that he can move across borders while many of the survivors he photographs face severe restrictions on movement, and he treats his mobility as a responsibility to carry messages and reports^*3. This self-understanding connects the photographer’s mobility to an editorial responsibility for whose words are carried, and where.

One Step Beyond — Repeating the Same Procedure Across Four Countries

Einsele and photographer Andreas Zierhut traveled to landmine-affected regions in Angola, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cambodia^*10. In each place they collected survivors’ testimony, sketches, portraits, and photographs of the surroundings. Repeating the same format across different political and geographic settings makes the recurring structure of landmine violence visible. Bildmuseet describes the connection among these elements as a “responsive presentation” intended to create a new aesthetic and political space^*7.

Distributing Research Across Book, Web, and Exhibition

The Hatje Cantz book contains 192 pages and 93 photographs, integrating testimony, sketches of accident sites, and essays into a single volume^*11. The official website functions as a research archive with access to mine types and regional information^*12. A Foto8 review praised the book as a “resource” bringing together personal testimony, portraits, statistics, and documentary images^*13. Information is distributed across exhibition, book, and web so that each medium can be read at a different pace. Witte de With’s publication record lists the book as a 192-page volume edited by Catherine David, published in 2005, with 43 color and 15 black-and-white images ^*14.

M85 — Tracing the Route Backward from Explosion Site to Manufacture and Distribution

In the later project The Many Moments of an M85 — Zenon’s Arrow Retraced, Einsele traces the route of the M85 cluster munition backward from its impact site through clearance, medical treatment, military use, sales, manufacture, and technical development^*15. After the Butcher’s exhibition text places injured and killed civilians, farmers, emergency personnel, surgeons, mine clearers, soldiers, politicians, dealers, factory workers, and engineers along the trajectory of the same weapon^*16. A lecture record from Württembergischer Kunstverein likewise describes the research method as moving from an impact site in southern Lebanon back toward the weapon’s origins^*17. The Many Moments of an M85 — Zenon’s Arrow Retraced was also included in FORMAT 2015’s Beyond Evidence exhibition, placing the project within a photography festival organized around questions of evidence^*18.

Recording the Time That Continues After the Explosion

Landmines remain in the ground after combat ends, and accidents continue to occur in the middle of everyday life. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines explains how the treaty placed mine clearance and victim assistance within the same framework as the ban on the weapon itself^*2. Einsele’s documentary work gathers faces, memories, landscapes, rehabilitation, and weapons documentation across the long aftermath of an accident. Kulturstiftung des Bundes describes One Step Beyond as a long-term project that makes the relationship between landmines and their victims visible and comprehensible^*19. Photography is used to trace the time an event leaves in people and places, rather than to prove what happened in a single instant.

Dividing the Work of Evidence Among Photographs, Testimony, Maps, and Data

Birk Weiberg analyzes One Step Beyond as an example of “transpositional photography,” focusing on the way photographs, testimony, and data produce knowledge as they move among different contexts^*20. The face carries the subject’s present, testimony carries the time of the accident, the hand-drawn map carries remembered space, and weapons data carries technical information and manufacture. This division clarifies the scope of each source and leaves room for viewers to move among fragments and construct causal relations themselves.

Placing the Subject’s Life History at the Center

The large-format portraits center on face and posture. Einsele’s criticism in the medico interview of representations in which “the wound alone becomes proof of existence” is directly connected to that compositional choice^*3. Hessische Kulturstiftung likewise describes the Angola research as bringing landmines and people into relation through photographic portraits, text, and drawing^*21. The editing makes room for life history alongside bodily injury.

Letting the Viewer Trace a Route from Accident to International Politics

In the exhibition, a viewer moves from portraits to sketches, maps, weapons documentation, and photographs of the locations. Bildmuseet explains that this connection aims to create a new aesthetic and political space for communicating a wide range of information and visual material to the public^*7. A later exhibition at Lumiar Cité connected research into mass weapons production and geopolitics to the art institution itself and extended the discussion toward the shared origins of modernity and capitalism^*22. Looking at a photograph becomes an entry point into the production, circulation, and policy structures beyond it.