The Latest at Goethe

Sibylle Bergemann wrote photography history with her fashion photos, portraits and images of daily life in East Berlin. The Goethe-Institut is showing the work of the artist, who passed away last autumn, in exhibitions that are reaching an enthusiastic audience from Milan to Moscow. By Jutta Voigt

There is a riddle hidden in every Bergemann picture; an uncertainty, something inexplicable. The photographer gave preference to camouflage colours. Jumper, jacket, earrings, car, all olive green or earth brown – one may need to disappear, to be invisible in order to see better. Reality may have hidden its wonders, but Sibylle Bergemann discovered them and never talked them up. Secrecy is a refuge, allowing for the hope that poetry will not betray. The photographer kept the secret, those of things and of people and her own. That protects from divestiture and keeps the intuition from erring.

Bergemann photos are already legendary today. The querulous girls on the beach chair, the angry dog of Kazan, the black sea-swept pier in Sellin, the disabled actors from the RambaZamba theatre. The image of the Nescafé hut in a remote suburb of Dakar in Senegal was recently sold by the Villa Grisebach auction house for 3,000 euros. She photographed the Marx and Engels statues, halved and bound, hovering from a crane over the centre of Berlin, demystified already at their inauguration in the decaying GDR – the pictures are hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

At the major Bergemann exhibition in 2006 at the Akademie der Künste, she worked busily into the evening with her photos, and then drove home to shower and change. She returned and said, “This must be some other event.” It did not enter her mind that the crowds of people that were pouring into the Akademie – they say there were 2,000 – all were coming to see her.

Never loud laughter!

The photographer was of delicate build, her skin was milky white with a few freckles and she had fine dark-blonde hair. Her narrow face was dominated by remarkably light eyes and an elegiac Jeanne Moreau mouth. She was shy, quiet and assertive; an opinionated pact had been made between sensitivity and energy. Only insiders knew that she had a robust sense of humour and could be silly at times.

I never saw her laugh out loud; she probably thought that would clash with her style. She might smile or laugh quietly, a brief giggle over an absurd situation, but never loud laughter. Perhaps she internalized an aversion to “smile please!” photography or to the prescribed optimism of the GDR press, where laughter simulated assent to the circumstances. Like the wide-open mouths of the advertising sector today laugh away fear of consumerism. There are rarely any smiles in Bergemann photos; anything loud is a lie.

It began with a dual passion. Sibylle Bergemann was a secretary in the offices of Magazin who knew: I can’t stay a secretary; I have to do something of my own. Her first photo was made with a monocular 6x6 SLR camera when she was 24. One day a man in an olive-green parka entered the editorial offices, a formidable storyteller, a man with wit and the absolute will to counter the predominant snapshot style photography with something conscious and direct. He was 15 years older than she, a well-kept photography secret and a unique teacher. Arno Fischer taught at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee. He was it, him and no other: I wanted Arno and I wanted to make photos. Bergemann got what she wanted; she became his student, his lover and his rival.

Abounding in colour

Sibylle Bergemann learned quickly. Just as quickly, she photographed differently and different subjects than her teacher. Reality without a dream would be the end of the world. She saw the beauty and she saw the doubt, she sought the dream behind reality. The photographer always carried her camera; she might meet with something that needed to be photographed, for example fallen angels. If she forgot her camera, she would go back home to fetch it.

She was often asked if her attitude to photography changed after the fall of the wall. “Why should it, I photograph the same as always,” Sibylle Bergemann replied. The storyteller’s eye remained; the search for poetry at the fringes, not the centre. One thing did change however. She switched from black and white to colour. The magazines that she now worked for demanded it. For half of her lifetime, the photographer was convinced that colour was unrealistic, garish and commonplace; colour was operetta. She reacted in her own way by making colour the accomplice of her vision. She drove out the garishness, gaudiness, brightness and made if soft, flowing and “grey.” On her African photos, a veil of dust seems to cover her scenes and at the same time discover them. Nothing is colourful and yet they abound in colour.

She never stopped trying new things

After her first cancer surgery six years ago, Sibylle Bergemann bought herself a Toyota Yaris Verso, a nice, green, solid car, unusually high and almost four metres long, with lots of space for dogs and photography boxes. “Some people might think, ‘why’s she buying a car when she’s got cancer,’” Sibylle remarked and stepped on the gas pedal. The purchase of the car was also a rebellion. It was rebellion like that against the conventional perceptions in photography, like her rebellion against the travel restrictions in the GDR, like her rebellion against surrendering herself to the fate of disease.

In those six years, she worked as if there were nothing amiss. She photographed to the very end. She never stopped trying new things. Rather than suffering a loss of personality during this difficult phase, the burden seemed to make her stronger. She held on to life, to this exciting life that offered new pictures to her every day. “When I was in the darkroom and something decent resulted from the photography, then suddenly everything was alright again. As if I were not ill at all.”

Last year, on 1 November the wonders in the fight for her life wore out. The wonders that remain are her pictures. She, Sibylle Bergemann, is wholly in every photo.

The article was first published in the Goethe-Institut magazine with the theme “Wie geht es eigentlich den Frauen?” (How are the women doing?) (PDF here).