Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Susanne Altmann, Bertram Kaschek, Anne Pfautsch, Katia Reich, Jan Wenzel, Frieda von Wild, Lily von Wild.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Berlin-born photographer Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010) created an extraordinary oeuvre ranging from fashion and portrait photographs to literary reportage and other series. In the GDR, Bergemann worked both freelance and for various art and culture magazines. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she cofounded the photographer’s agency Ostkreuz and worked for leading German as well as international magazines such as GEO, Die Zeit, Stern and the New York Times Magazine. This catalog, accompanying the exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, approaches the unique visual universe of one Germany’s most famous photographers on several narrative levels. Including more than 200 photographs from the museum’s own collection as well as from the photographer’s estate, it shows selected images from her early work for the first time.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Bernd Heise. Text by Jutta Voigt.
German photographer Sibylle Bergemann (1941-2010) made her living in fashion photography, but it was with her portraits of everyday life in East Germany over the 45 years of its existence that she gained acclaim. Nonetheless, she managed to make even her fashion photography subversive by East German terms, creating brilliant flares of color against uniform gray backdrops. “It's the fringes of the world that interest me,” she famously declared, “not its center. The non-interchangeable is my concern. When there is something in faces or landscapes that doesn't quite fit.” Well suited to such concerns, Polaroids have always occupied a place of affection within Bergemann's oeuvre; in these pictures, the artist captured more ephemeral moments and images than is typical of the rest of her oeuvre. Collected here for the first time, they record a vision without comparison in European photography.
Sibylle Bergemann: Polaroids