In 1967, Axel Herrmann began a career as a commercial pilot, and over the following decade he carried a camera alongside his flight bag. The photographs gathered in *Continental Breakfast* come from that period, when he and his wife Heide—a stewardess he met soon after joining the airline—moved through layovers in places such as Hawaii, Tokyo, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. Herrmann photographed Heide in airplanes and at work, in front of tourist attractions, on beaches, at pools, against sunset backdrops, and in hotels with friends and relatives. The images are private in the fullest sense: a husband’s record of his wife and of a way of travelling that mass tourism would soon make far less exclusive.
The book takes its title from Daniel Herrmann, the couple’s son, who scanned part of his father’s slide archive while completing a final project at the HfG design school in Offenbach. After Heide’s death in 2002, Axel Herrmann destroyed a large part of his film and photographic archive, and only these scans and around one hundred original slides survive. The images are reproduced unretouched, their scratches, color shifts, and emulsion wear left visible. That decision lets the Kodachrome palette carry its own historical weight and treats deterioration as part of the record rather than as damage to be corrected. Daniel Herrmann’s project made both this book and the exhibition about his flying parents’ unusual life possible.
Hartmann Books published the book in 2018 as a 48-page booklet with 56 illustrations, in a German and English edition edited by Beate Kemfert and Markus Hartmann, with graphic design by Antonia Grösschen. Its small format—14.8 by 21 centimetres, in a cellophane bag—suits a project that began as family material. The *lost&found* series to which it belongs presents analogue photographs and picture archives discovered through intuition, chance, odd encounters, and the slow passage of time. *Continental Breakfast* is a particularly clear instance of that programme: an archive nearly lost, recovered by a family member, and presented without retouching.
For readers drawn to postwar colour photography, vernacular archives, or the visual culture of aviation, this is a concentrated and unusually personal example. It also stands as a record of collaboration across generations, in which a son’s student project became the means by which his father’s photographs entered public view.
