The German photographer’s work is to be presented for the first time in Bulgaria through a comprehensive exhibition whose highlights include black-and-white gelatin prints, colour photographs and Polaroid reproductions.

Bergemann focused on the development of series of photographs, as well as on covering specific topics over extended periods of time. She worked in the fields of fashion and portrait photography, contributing to the magazines Sibylle and Geo. She took to situational photography in Berlin in the late 1960’s. Later, she compiled photographic reportages about New York, Paris, Tokyo and São Paulo. She worked with a Polaroid instant camera for a long time, making predominantly black-and-white photographs until 1990. She is among the few photographers using colour film as a structural component of the image rather than as an illustrative one.

The Fading Memories Polaroid series covering the period 2000 – 2006 reveals abandoned places and spaces which remain mostly hidden from the viewer’s conscious perception. The shots are devoid of melancholic nostalgia for East Germany, consciously representing a bygone era. Another significant fragment of Bergemann’s work are the photographs she took in Africa and the Middle East over the period 1999 – 2004. Her photographs from Ghana, Senegal, Mali and Yemen capture everyday life in its entire ambivalence, as a cross between traditional culture and globalization.

Sibylle Bergemann (1941 – 2010) is one of the most prominent German photographers of the past decades. She gained initial recognition with the photographs she contributed to fashion magazines in East Berlin, yet it did not take long before she became a prominent representative of the genre of photographic essay, as well as a close observer of social reality. Her work clearly reveals her own critique of the reproduction of the simulation of an ‘ideal’ context. This effect is achieved through the representation of the impact of the mythologized hollow enthusiasm implied and imposed by the GDR era.

After the reunification of Germany, she co-founded the Ostkreuz photography agency and became a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Today some of her photographs are featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, etc. This coming June, a large retrospective exhibition of her work will open at the Berlinische Galerie.

The exhibition is accompanied by the mediator and educational programme Viewing with Understanding: Sibylle Bergemann, organized by Goethe–Institut Bulgarien and the Art: Actions and Documents foundation. The programme features tours, child and parent workshops, senior citizen visits, and a lecture by Katerina Gadzheva about Bulgarian women photographers.

„Sibylle Bergemann. Photographs“ is an exhibition of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) presented in cooperation with Goethe–Institut Bulgarien and in partnership with the Sofia City Art Gallery.