Maison Hefner was a tattoo parlour run by Monty Richthofen in Leipzig that evolved its own art form of sketchy handwriting and broken poetry over the course of a decade. In 2024 Richthofen deleted his instagram account – which at that point numbered 110,000 followers – in a deliberate artistic act that marked the end Maison Hefner’s contract with social media. Monty Richthofen’s book, The Life and Death of Maison Hefner, departs from that point of closure to stage the tension between ephemerality and permanence, translating a digital stream into a physical, living archive.
Better understood as an act of authorship and not preservation alone, The Life and Death of Maison Hefner gathers a body of work as raw material to accessed and read with slower engagement, to be read non-linearly, to return to and to linger upon. It retrieves its narrative from the speed of the feed and restores context to what was once consumed in noise. It stages the tension between ephemerality and permanence, translating a digital stream into a physical archive, an afterlife in a controlled environment that avoids further proliferation of images online.
After all, tattooing persists alongside this shift: a parallel archive, carried on bodies, aging with time, resisting reproduction. In contrast to the disembodied digital image, it remains physical, intimate, irreversible.
Sorry Press, 480pp, 12cm x 19cm, illustrated paperback, 2026
