Sibylle Bergemann

Sibylle Bergemann (29 August 1941 – 2 November 2010) was a German photographer. In 1990, she co-founded the Ostkreuz photographers agency. She is remembered for documenting developments in East Berlin during the Communist era and for her international assignments for Stern and later for Geo.

Early life

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.

Career as photographer

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.