Although she has only been rediscovered lately, Sibylle Bergemann is one of the most well-known photographers of the former GDR. Her sensitive approach to the realities of Eastern German life and her unmistakable, subjective point of view, which continuously drew new, poetically surreal images from reality, are distinctive in her work. Bergemann learned photography in the mid-60s from Arno Fischer, another photographer later to become her husband. She was a consummate master of various genres, from portrait to landscape, fashion shoot to photo reportage. From the 1970s onward, she worked for cultural journals, such as Sonntag, Das Magazin or Sibylle.
The urban landscape of Berlin is a central subject in Bergemann’s oeuvre. She took incomparable photographs of both the prestigious objects and central sites of Eastern German urban planning, the plattenbaus and the Palace of the Republic, as well as the Mitte district of Berlin, scarred by the traces of history. Her interest lay in the “Rand der Welt” (“edge of the world”), as she said; in that which is unique, enigmatic and scorns conformity.
During the era of reunification, the city borders—the Wall—first demarcating separation and then connection, became a focal point of her attention. The window photographs constitute a unique body of work, and a publication was dedicated to them posthumously in 2011. As pictures within pictures, they are both signs of life and abstract compositions. They bear witness to present and past, diversity and decay.
Other protagonists of East German photography fall in line with Bergemann’s subjective world view. Along with Arno Fischer, Ursula Arnold and Evelyn Richter—both roughly a decade older than Sibylle Bergemann—count among the first East German photographers who joined collective memory by opposing the official point of view with their own, socially engaged, personal ones. Arno Fischer created iconic images of the present in East and West Berlin before the Wall was built, and incorporated the history of the city, evident within them, in casual observations. Fischer, Bergemann, Roger Melis and others joined forces in the second half of the 1960s, founding the “Direkt” group in 1969, representing an engaged and independent visual language within art.
Sibylle Bergemann, Der Rand der Welt
April 29 – September 1, 2017
Kicken Berlin
Linienstrasse 161A D
10115 Berlin
Germany
