Featuring just under 130 photographs spanning four decades, the exhibition presented, for the first time in Dresden, a representative cross-section of Roger Melis’s (1940–2009) portrait work and photojournalism.
At the heart of the retrospective were the legendary portraits of writers and visual artists, through which Roger Melis played a decisive role in shaping the ‘face’ of East German culture. Photographs such as those of an exhausted Anna Seghers, of Wolf Biermann on the Weidendammer Bridge, or of Sarah Kirsch standing on her boxes packed for emigration have, due to their historical significance, become ‘icons’ over the years. Presented in chronological order, they also serve to bring to life once again the vibrant intellectual life of the East German cultural scene from the early 1960s right through to the subcultural movement of the late 1980s.
As a photojournalist and a flâneur, Melis spent three decades travelling from Berlin throughout the GDR – a country he often perceived as ‘still’ and frozen under the rule of the SED. In atmospheric, often symbolic photographs, he – described as a ‘master of East German photorealism’ (Die Zeit) – documented the everyday lives of people in towns and the countryside, shedding light on their working and living conditions. Alongside striking portraits of children, young people, craftspeople, and industrial, agricultural and forestry workers, the early photographs from Dresden and Meissen occupy a special place in this exhibition.
To mark the exhibition curated by Mathias Bertram, a catalogue has been published featuring texts by Eugen Blume and Uwe Kolbe, which presents the series ‘The Artists of Prenzlauer Berg’ in its entirety for the first time.
Biographical details
Roger Melis, born in Berlin in 1940, grew up in the home of the poet Peter Huchel in west Berlin and, from 1952, in Wilhelmshorst near Potsdam. Following an apprenticeship as a photographer, he worked as a medical photographer at Berlin’s Charité hospital from 1962 to 1968. Alongside this, he began producing his first portraits of artists in 1962, and from 1963 onwards he also produced photo-essays. From 1968, Melis worked as a freelance fashion, reportage and portrait photographer for newspapers, magazines and publishers in both East and West Germany. Due to a joint article with Erich Loest for GEO magazine, he was barred from working for the GDR press from 1983 to 1989 and turned his attention increasingly to book and exhibition projects. He taught at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art from 1978 to 1990 and at the Lette-Verein Berlin from 1993 to 2006. Roger Melis had been married to the fashion journalist Dorothea Melis since 1970. He died in Berlin in the autumn of 2009.
Catalogue
A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.