Sibylle Bergemann – The Polaroids

Hatje Cantz 2011

144 pages, 111 ill.
Hardcover, 15,00 x 21,00 cm

The late, great German photographer Sibylle Bergemann (1941-2010) always pursued her own artistic path. Even her earliest works, for the East German fashion magazine Sibylle, were like brilliant flares of color amid the uniform Socialist gray. Her later portraits, photojournalism, and travel photography–most of them in color–continued to concentrate on the realities of life, and were printed in leading magazines around the world. Bergemann’s Polaroids occupied a very special, personal place in her oeuvre. In these pictures, the artist captured things that are basically impossible to catch–the beautiful moment that will not linger. This moment is as temporary as the medium in which the contours are shown. They are dreamlike, delicate images, created to fight the way that humans forget, and they avoid any sort of categorization in terms of time and space.