Sibylle Bergemann

After clerical jobs, Bergemann began working in 1965 at the monthly magazine Das Magazin, and from around 1966 attended the lectures of Arno Fischer, who taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee; in 1967 she started working as a photographer for the cultural and literary weekly Sonntag^*1. AWARE notes that Fischer was continuously involved in her formation as teacher, advisor, critic and supporter, and that their relationship nurtured her view of photography^*3. Gruppe Direkt, which she formed in 1969 with Fischer, Roger Melis and others, sought new standards for East German magazine photography and supported exchange among photographers who observed people and society in the settings of daily life^*3. Bergemann and Fischer’s East Berlin apartment was visited by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank and Helmut Newton, among others, becoming a place where East German photographers made contact with international photographic culture through limited channels^*3. In East Germany, from 1949 onward, photographic education, professional associations and the subjects and language of press photography were organised under state institutions^*27. The Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, together with magazines, photobooks, photo-essays and exhibitions, became important places for photographers to develop their own expression^*23. Sibylle, for which she worked continuously from 1970, was an East German cultural magazine that, alongside fashion, dealt with art, architecture, culture and everyday life, and placed photography and graphic design at the centre of its page design^*2. This overlap of education, personal exchange, magazine editing and commissioned work shaped Bergemann’s method of grasping people together with their social environment and building narratives out of several photographs. Bergemann later explained that she had wanted to be a photographer by the age of fifteen and went to Fischer’s lectures out of her own desire to photograph^*17. While she set up a darkroom in her kitchen and accumulated shooting and printing, she developed — from Eugène Atget, Édouard Boubat, The Family of Man and the literary reportage of Sonntag editor Jutta Voigt — an eye that read cities, people and places as relationships^*17.

Building photographs into a narrative

Bergemann devoted herself to photo-essays and long-term series^*9. ifa positions her as both a fashion photographer and an important practitioner of the photo-essay, describing her as an author who wrote stories through photography^*9. Arno Fischer’s guidance, the literary reportage of Sonntag, and her experience at Sibylle — where photograph, text and layout came together — shaped a way of editing multiple images to speak about society^*17. She repeatedly captured moments in which “something is slightly off” within a face or a landscape, and people and places that no other image could replace^*9. AWARE argues that her photographs became a means to understand the hopes, desires and sorrows of people living in East Germany, and that they held frankness, engagement and a quiet irony^*3. Weaving people, places and objects into series, she kept on the surface of the image the feelings and time that layered over everyday East German life.

Why photography — linking seeing to social relations

In 1973 Bergemann described photography as perceiving and conveying, in a sensory way, an “attitude” toward human beings and their relationships, toward things and their connections^*17. In 1987 she explained that by learning what people do, how they react to one another and what they live surrounded by, one can see their social relations^*17. The camera became a “third eye” for waiting unobtrusively in the street, searching for the moment when a person, a window, a dog, architecture and light form a single relationship. In her later years she named the brief time when an image takes shape — during shooting and in the darkroom — as a happiness of her life; photography was both a profession that records reality and a way of finding, within the everyday, images no one had yet seen^*24.

Arno Fischer — the divided city and everyday life as photo-essay

Arno Fischer moved from sculpture to photography and, in his 1950s Situation Berlin, walked the four occupation zones, composing people in the streets, destroyed buildings, vacant lots and traffic from multiple scenes. After the building of the Berlin Wall, the plan to publish this series as a book was forbidden, but he continued to weave the relation between people and environment into series — from the fashion, portraits and travels in East Germany and abroad in Sibylle to the garden Polaroids of his later years^*28. In the 1960s Sibylle gave Fischer and others a public venue to publish socially critical and experimental photography, opening an important channel in East German photographic culture^*31. Bergemann later explained that she had wanted to be a photographer by the age of fifteen and went to Fischer’s lectures of her own will^*17. There she encountered a method of linking people’s faces and gestures with urban space and making multi-layered narratives out of small everyday scenes. Contemporary assessments and the testimony of his students relate that Fischer’s teaching centred on an attitude toward life and on cultivating each person’s own visual language^*29. Bergemann extended this method to fashion staging, images of women, fragments of monuments, colour and Polaroids, developing it into a photographic language marked by quietness and ambiguity.

Bergemann recalled that, in her early Windows, she did not yet have the courage to point the camera directly at people, and imagined the inhabitants from windows, curtains and the traces left in interiors^*17. This careful observational stance grew, through Fischer’s photo-essays and the literary reportage of Sonntag, into a method of grasping people together with their environment and social relations^*17. As East Germany’s official imagery sorted people into clear social roles, that method also became a form for keeping the reality that no role could contain and for protecting the photographer’s own way of seeing^*17.

Beyond the imagery of East Germany

In Bergemann’s photographs, a person’s posture, clothing, background, light and the arrangement of objects became the main clues conveying the condition of East German society. The Berlinische Galerie records that she sought to protect artistic autonomy and a personal style beyond the party’s visual norms, and lists Atget, Boubat and The Family of Man as her cross-border references^*17. MIEJSCE questions a reception that confines her work to dissident East German photography, arguing that both her experience under communism and the changes after reunification shaped her practice^*14. Bergemann photographed East German reality as a relation between people and environment. Keeping on the image the many feelings and times that lie inside institutions and daily life is one reason her work is read beyond its place-names.

Turning fashion into portraiture within society

On the pages of Sibylle, models stand on Berlin streets, in gardens, old buildings, housing blocks and industrial spaces, where clothing, body and the surfaces of the city compose a single frame^*2. The official estate’s “Women and Fashion” includes Birgit Karbjinski, Berlin, which places a figure before a wall, and Annette und Angela, Lustgarten, Berlin, which builds a relationship between two people in public space^*5. AWARE explains that Bergemann herself thought of these as both fashion photographs and portraits, including in the frame the wear of the urban environment and a comment on the image of the human being that socialism proclaimed^*3. Clothing works as a surface that shows how one presents oneself within a society and to what degree one can remain an individual. The coexistence of composed poses, closed expressions, glamorous garments and damaged walls makes visible at once the desirable image of life the magazine presents and the time of the place where the model actually stands. Her fashion photography captured the process by which a person takes on a social role while keeping a distance from their own feelings. She herself called fashion photography an artistic expression, saying that clothing guides the idea and motif, and that the photograph arises from a garment that acts on her^*17. Even in Dakar after reunification she turned an ordinary reportage into a fashion series using the costumes of Oumou Sy, so that fashion was a continuous language of expression — binding people, place and colour into a single image — beyond her duties of the East German period^*25.

Making the relation between people, environment and institutions a portrait

Bergemann herself thought of fashion photography as portraiture, and in 1973 defined photography as an attitude toward “human beings and their relationships, things and their connections”^*17. In her work, the subject of the portrait expands from a person’s face and body to a relation that includes clothing, interiors, the city and political structures. In P2 she set side by side different living rooms within identically standardised housing blocks, photographing — through furniture, wallpaper and the arrangement of objects — the place where life’s choices meet social institutions^*34. In Das Denkmal she followed the processes of dividing, covering, transporting and installing, making a series of how political thought is shaped by matter, labour and time^*6. In the fashion and Berlin photographs too, figure, clothing, posture and background keep shifting one another’s meaning. The Berlinische Galerie presents her practice as a crossing of city, fashion, portrait and photo-essay^*4. AWARE explains that Bergemann understood fashion photography as portraiture and included in the frame a gaze toward the urban environment and the social image of the human being^*3.

The Family of Man showed Bergemann a human-centred view of photography and the possibility of preserving individual authorship within a public cultural institution^*17. In P2, the choices of life remaining inside uniform housing fill the absence of the residents^*34. In Das Denkmal, political thought appears as a relation of sculpture, labour, transport and time^*6. Bergemann’s portrait expands into a relationship in which people and the surrounding world shape one another.

Creating distance between staging and observation

While composing the model’s position, posture and clothing, Bergemann kept in the frame the scars, blanks, passers-by and aged buildings remaining at the location. The Berlinische Galerie placed at the centre of its retrospective the way she staged figures within real environments and created a distinctive tension between that environment and the figure^*4. Staging arranges the model toward an ideal image while also showing that gestures are roles learned from society. Through observation she verified the details of the background, the figure’s gaze and the sense of unease left in the empty parts of the frame. As ifa explains that Bergemann’s photographs are an interpretation of reality and a statement of an attitude toward it, she combined staging and recording to create a distance that leaves multiple readings of the figure^*9. That distance lets beautiful clothing, urban decay and a person’s silence be read at once, opening the meaning of the photograph in several directions. Her daughter Frieda von Wild testifies that Bergemann pictured the image before shooting and adjusted the situation until it approached the photograph in her mind^*24. That she rarely cropped negatives and, in colour works, repeatedly printed the same image until it matched the feeling of the place she had seen shows that she treated the composition at the time of shooting and the judgment of colour in the darkroom as one continuous act of making^*24.

Das Denkmal — returning an official image to matter and time

Her signature work Das Denkmal is a series following the Marx–Engels monument in East Berlin as it was made, divided, transported and installed in the workshop of the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt^*7. Bergemann began photographing in 1975, received an official commission from the Ministry of Culture in 1977, and over the eleven years until the unveiling in 1986 shot more than four hundred rolls of film, finally selecting twelve images^*6. A head set on the ground, a torso with seams, the figure suspended from a crane — these show the thinkers as products of making, accompanied by weight, surface, labour and transport. The Städel Museum presents the work as the ninth of a set of twelve, together with the material information of the gelatin silver print^*8. Each image records a single scene of the production process and, in the order of the series, conveys the time in which the monument takes shape. After 1989, Das Denkmal was read as an image that foretold the end of the East German regime, but the HCB Foundation distinguishes that later historical reinterpretation from the circumstances at the time of shooting^*6. Bergemann preserved as a series the process before the official meaning had set, leaving a structure in which later eras could find other meanings.

Margins, windows, colour — keeping traces of life

Bergemann’s words — that she was “more interested in the margins than the centre of the world” — indicate why windows, dogs, vacant lots, construction sites, city walls and figures with averted gazes recur^*9. Windows make visible the distance between inside and outside, private life and public space, the one who looks and the one who is looked at, giving the surfaces of buildings traces of life much like those of people. The official estate’s “Berlin” series, spanning from Karl-Marx-Allee in the 1980s to the post-reunification Palast der Republik and Potsdamer Platz, composes a single city as a time in which demolition, construction and forgetting overlap^*10. In the colour and Polaroids that became important from around 1990, colour became a compositional element that creates a distance between memory and the present^*9. The official estate’s “The Polaroids” retains colour bias, fading, blur and accidental change, so that the moment an image is born and the time in which it is lost appear on the same surface^*11. C/O Berlin also links the immediacy and fragility of the Polaroid with Bergemann’s sense of intimacy, time and forgetting^*12. She kept in photographs the experience of the individual wavering within society as changes of colour, surface and time.

A longing to travel, and an eye formed in the East

East Germany’s travel system defined the range of Bergemann’s movement; she described her greatest problem as “not being able to get out,” and said she wanted to travel and see the world^*25. The wish she voiced repeatedly was the freedom of movement to see with her own eyes the people and places of Paris, New York and elsewhere. She first travelled to Paris at thirty-eight, after it took nine months to obtain permission^*25. From her own words that her stance toward seeing things did not change even as her shooting locations and techniques widened after reunification, it is clear that the observation she had cultivated in East Germany became her standard for reading the relation between people and environment even in unfamiliar places^*17.

Birgit Karbjinski, Berlin (1984)

In Birgit Karbjinski, Berlin, the model, the clothing and the city wall compose the frame with equal strength, and figure and background are bound into a single social space^*5. Clothing works as a surface showing how the figure is seen in that place and how she presents herself. Reading at once the design of the garment, the feet, the texture of the wall, the empty space in the frame and the gaze the model returns to the camera, the tension between fashion and living environment comes into view.

Annette und Angela, Lustgarten, Berlin (1982)

Annette und Angela, Lustgarten, Berlin incorporates into one image the similar gestures and differences of two women and the relation between clothing and public space, turning fashion photography into a portrait that reads the relationship between the two^*5. The 2026 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama (Kanagawa) presents this work together with The Monument, Berlin, February 1986, composing a show in which Bergemann’s gaze, directed at the different subjects of the female body and the national monument, can be traced together^*16.

Das Denkmal (1975–1986)

Das Denkmal came into being by choosing, from material shot over a long period, which moments of the production process to keep and in what order to show them. The narrowing to twelve images was an editing that gave the monument’s construction multiple times through the relation of head, torso, sky, workers, crane and vacant lot^*6. In 1990 it was published as the photobook Ein Gespenst verlässt Europa, combined with poems by Heiner Müller, and after the end of East Germany the meaning of the work was rearranged^*6. As shooting, selection, photobook, exhibition and political time overlap, the same images acquire different historical meanings.

Cheick und Moustafa, Dakar, Senegal (2001)

Cheick und Moustafa, Dakar, Senegal was made by switching an ordinary reportage planned for GEO into a fashion series using the costumes of the Senegalese designer Oumou Sy^*25. Bergemann chose the models, searched the city for place and light, and built a frame in which the costumes, the stalls, and the colours of sea and sky answer one another. This work shows that even as she expanded her activity around the world after reunification, the method of converting clothing into a relation between people and environment remained at the centre of her practice.

Magazines, photobooks, agency

Bergemann’s work reached readers through magazine spreads, photo-essays, photobooks, exhibitions and the agency. Ostkreuz, which she co-founded in 1990 with Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler and others, became a community in which photographers supported one another’s work, copyright and editorial decisions in the post-reunification market, and Bergemann also influenced later generations through teaching^*13. In the series on the RambaZamba theatre, shot from 1997 to 2009, on-stage performance, costume, body and the gaze of the audience overlap, extending into the theatre the arrangement and observation of people she had cultivated in fashion photography^*18. Her career moving back and forth between magazines, photobooks, exhibitions and the agency was also a process of continually testing how to preserve the authorship of the photograph and build a relationship with readers in each medium.

A photographic culture that spoke of everyday East German life

East German photographic culture, while subject to state control of the press, professional associations, education and publishing, created places to keep the photographer’s judgment within magazines, photobooks, photo-essays and exhibitions. The Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig presents the process by which photographers from the 1950s onward took part in press, fashion and advertising work and, from the 1960s, widened their artistic freedom through photo picture-books, photo-essays and exhibitions^*23. The Berlinische Galerie’s “Geschlossene Gesellschaft” gathered East German photography including commissioned work, journalism, advertising and private practice, showing that each photographer had their own region, technique, subject and strategy of expression^*19. Within this culture, daily life, labour, the city, the home and people’s expressions could be material for conveying the state’s official image and material for reading society critically. The photography researcher Anne Pfautsch argues that East German documentary photography worked as an “alternative public sphere” exchanging private discussion and critical positions, and that everyday images and irony produced coded communication^*21. Through Sonntag and Sibylle, the Ministry of Culture commission, and exchange in photographers’ apartments, Bergemann wove the relation between people and society into narratives inside this photographic culture. AWARE states that her work held together the hopes, desires and sorrows of people living in East Germany with frankness, engagement and a quiet irony^*3. Cultural magazines such as Das Magazin and Sibylle, universities, photo clubs, editorial offices and the small exhibitions of the cultural league formed multiple paths leading from school to magazine, photobook and exhibition^*27.

Two institutions and visual cultures born of division

The division of postwar Germany organised in different directions, East and West, the institutions by which photographers were educated, found work, presented their work and were evaluated as “art photography.” In the West, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typology connected to the contexts of New Objectivity, Minimal Art and Conceptual Art, and when Bernd Becher became professor of photography at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1976, an educational foundation was formed from which Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer advanced into international museums and markets^*22. In the East, the state organised education, professional associations and press media, and magazines, newspapers, books, public commissions and the exhibitions of the photographers’ association became the main places of activity^*27. Within that environment, Arno Fischer, Evelyn Richter, Roger Melis, Helga Paris, Ute Mahler, Bergemann and others developed a language of photo-essay and documentary that dealt with people’s living environments, labour and the transformation of the city^*20. The typological photographs and series of the West connected to the international contemporary-art system through the Düsseldorf Art Academy^*22. After reunification, photography from the East tended to be received as testimony to East German history or as dissident expression, and recent exhibitions and archival research are reconsidering each photographer’s method^*14. The difference between the two regions appeared concretely in the institutions of production costs, censorship, distribution, education, exhibition and the market. The fact that photographers from the West and abroad visited Bergemann’s East Berlin apartment shows that personal channels existed even between the divided systems^*3. For Bergemann, fashion magazines, the photo-essay, public commissions and Ostkreuz were the main media that brought her work into being.

Bergemann’s series also connect to the question of typology running through twentieth-century German photography^*32. Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century built types by occupation and class, showing the structure of German society through their arrangement. Each photograph captures expression, dress, posture and living environment in detail, keeping the character and life of the person inside the type^*33. P2 repeats the interiors of identically standardised housing blocks, capturing the differences of life that appear within shared architectural conditions^*34. In the fashion and city series, the relation between figure and place gives multiple expressions to a social role^*3. The tension between type and individual expands, in Bergemann’s photographs, into the relation between people and environment.

The post-reunification market and the legacy to the present

After reunification, the fixed-fee system of the East German period was lost, and negotiation and competition for each job became necessary^*24. In 1990 seven people — Bergemann, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Harald Hauswald and others — founded Ostkreuz, creating, even within a commercial environment, a mechanism of “authored photography” in which the photographers themselves bear the choice of work, copyright, distribution and editorial decisions^*24. This idea was passed on to the teaching of the Ostkreuzschule, which grew out of the agency in 2004^*26. The school sees photography as a language and the photographer as an author, and sets out to explore social and political relations from a clear point of view and to cultivate one’s own visual language through technique, theory, practice and joint discussion^*26. Ute Mahler said that making begins with a question, and that a photographer’s attitude appears in a photograph that captures reality^*30. Bergemann defined photography as an attitude toward people and relationships, things and connections^*17. Fischer taught a stance of drawing close to life and the making of multi-layered narratives^*29. In the school’s policy of cultivating each person’s visual language through question, observation, editing and joint criticism, the view of photography the three shared is given concrete form^*26.

The method Bergemann left behind

Bergemann entered the production sites of commissioned magazines and monuments and, through people, background and the editing of series, kept individual experience within the meaning the medium had intended. In fashion photography she linked clothing and the city, opening the portrait onto the social environment. In Das Denkmal she followed a national symbol as a product of making, placing the process by which authority takes shape within time. In Berlin, windows, dogs, colour and Polaroids she observed how political change settles onto the surfaces of life and into memory. Ostkreuz presents that in Bergemann’s work dream and social reality, an awareness of composition and colour, coexist, and that she influenced later generations through teaching^*13. The Berlinische Galerie’s 2022 retrospective, through more than two hundred works, presented fashion, the city, women, dogs, travel and colour as a single body of work^*4. The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 2025 exhibition of Das Denkmal became an occasion to re-examine eleven years of shooting and editing^*6. The 2026 exhibition of East German women photographers at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama (Kanagawa) placed her work within magazine culture, the labour of women photographers and the divided history of German photography^*16. She added to photography a way of reading society from clothing, posture, walls, windows, the seams of monuments and the fading of colour. The ordering of the archive by her daughter and granddaughter created a basis for re-reading the body of work along the artist’s choices and production process^*15. The Berlinische Galerie’s retrospective presented the whole practice including, alongside Das Denkmal, fashion, travel, colour, Polaroids and theatre^*4. MIEJSCE’s archival research reconsiders the earlier reception focused on East German history and dissident expression, capturing the changes in the work that continue up to after reunification^*14.