The Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg's Institute for Sound and Vision, recently received part of the photographic collection of Lutz Teutloff (*1938 - †2017) of Bielefeld, which he assembled under the title "The Contemporary Family of Man".
Today, "The Family of Man" is on the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage register and will go down in history as an extraordinarily ambitious project – both in its scale and in the manner in which it is displayed. Ever since it was first created, this historic exhibition and Steichen's concept of mankind have inspired countless artists, curators, writers and collectors to respond to it and enter into dialogue with it. Among them was Lutz Teutloff, who created his own photographic collection in the same style: at around the start of the new millennium, he began building up a collection on the theme of the Conditio Humana which he later entitled "The Contemporary Family of Man". The Teutloff Collection includes notable works by internationally renowned artists of the last 50 years. Now a selection of 471 works of art, mainly photographs, by 195 artists has been put in the care of the CNA. Along with the collection of photographs, a library consisting of about 4000 volumes about the history of contemporary art and photography has also been handed over to the CNA.
The artists featured in the collection include Antoine d’Agata, Aziz+Cucher, Roger Ballen, Nina Berman, Valie Export, Thomas Florschütz, Jim Goldberg, Paul Graham, Pieter Hugo, Jürgen Klauke, Herlinde Koelbl, Susan Meiselas, Zanele Muholi, Michael Najjar, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Andres Serrano, Miroslav Tichy, etc.
At the moment, the works are being inventoried and examined at the CNA in Dudelange. Each work is closely examined and goes through different stages, such as identification, status reporting, authentication, restoration and digitization. In parallel, research was conducted to develop an appropriate exhibition space to present the collection. The latter was finally found in the immediate vicinity of the Château de Clervaux, in the former Brasserie de Lannoy from the eighteenth century, which offers on three floors the ideal setting to create a dialogue between the two collections in a spatial context.
A feasibility study for transformation and renovation was first conducted in 2019 in collaboration with the Public Buildings Administration and a team of architects and engineers.
