Sibylle Bergemann

"I'm interested in the edges of the world, not the centre."

Born in 1941 in Berlin where she was raised and educated, she first worked as a secretary for the East German periodical Das Magazin. Interested in art and culture, from 1966 she studied photography in the Weissensee district of Berlin under the photographer Arno Fischer, with whom she was married from 1985.

After first contributing to leading East German periodicals of the time, Das Magazin and Sonntag, in the early 1970s, her photographs started to appear in the women's fashion magazine Sibylle where she soon developed her own style. Her portraits were not analytical but rather descriptive, showing people as they appeared in real life.She moved on from fashion to photograph first her own country, East Germany, and later the rest of the world. In 1990, together with Ute Mahler and Harald Hauswald, she founded the Ostkreuz agency, which now represents a score of photographers.

Perhaps Bergemann's most important legacy is the series of black-and-white photographs she took of everyday life in East Germany as it evolved over the years. Later, she compiled photographic reportages about New York City, Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo; and even more recently, turning from black and white to colour, she travelled through Africa and Asia on assignments for Geo. In 1994, Bergemann's talent was recognized when she became a member of Academy of Arts, Berlin. In 2007, she held an exhibition of her work at the Museum für Photographie in Braunschweig.