With almost 130 photographs from four decades, the exhibition shows for the first time in Dresden a representative cross-section of the portrait work and reportage photography of Roger Melis (1940 - 2009).
At the centre of the retrospective are the legendary portraits of writers and visual artists with which Roger Melis significantly shaped the "face" of East German culture. Photographs such as those of the exhausted Anna Seghers, Wolf Biermann on the Weidendammer Bridge or Sarah Kirsch on her departure crates have become "icons" over the years due to their historical significance. Arranged chronologically in the exhibition, they also visualise once again the eventful intellectual life of the East German cultural scene from the early 1960s to the subcultural awakening movement of the late 1980s.
As a photojournalist and flaneur, Melis spent three decades travelling the GDR from Berlin, a country that he often found to be "silent" and frozen under the rule of the SED. As a "master of East German photorealism" (Die Zeit), he documented the everyday life of people in the city and countryside and illuminated their working and living conditions in atmospherically dense, often symbolic photographs. In addition to haunting portraits of children, young people, craftsmen, industrial, agricultural and forestry workers, the early photographs from Dresden and Meissen occupy a special place in this exhibition.
On the occasion of the exhibition, curated by Mathias Bertram, a catalogue with texts by Eugen Blume and Uwe Kolbe was published, showing the series "Die Künstler vom Prenzlauer Berg" in its entirety for the first time.
The upper exhibition rooms are currently not barrier-free.
Biography
Roger Melis, born in Berlin in 1940, grew up in the household of the poet Peter Huchel in West Berlin and from 1952 in Wilhelmshorst near Potsdam. After an apprenticeship as a photographer, he worked as a scientific photographer at the Charité hospital in Berlin from 1962 to 1968. From 1962 onwards, he also took his first portraits of artists, and from 1963 onwards he also produced reportages. From 1968, Melis worked as a freelance fashion, reportage and portrait photographer for newspapers, magazines and publishers in East and West Germany. Because of a joint article with Erich Loest for the magazine GEO, he was no longer allowed to work for the GDR press from 1983 to 1989 and increasingly turned to book and exhibition projects. He taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee 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 autumn 2009.
Catalogue
A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.