In a career spanning more than four decades, Berlin-born Sibylle Bergemann created an extraordinary oeuvre ranging from fashion and portrait photographs, literary reportages and artistic documentary series. Alternating between commissions and work of her own choosing, her focus was always on people. In the GDR, Bergemann worked both freelance as well as continuously for various art and culture magazines. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she co-founded the self-administered photographer's agency OSTKREUZ, and worked for leading German as well as international magazines such as GEO, Die Zeit, Stern or New York Times Magazine. The catalog accompanying the exhibition at Berlinische Galerie approaches the unique visual universe of one Germany's most famous photographers on several narrative levels. Including more than 200 photographs from the museum's own collection as well as from the photographer's estate, it shows selected images from her early work for the first time.

"She, a woman of high beauty, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to escape her loneliness and to leave La Rotonda. She bought a ticket 'Aller jamais retour. Berlin Tegel'." This is the opening scene of Ulrike Ottinger's momentous 1979 film Ticket of No Return-the woman of high beauty was Tabea Blumenschein. Unconcerned by all conventions, Blumenschein adored transformation: in a distinctive, avant-garde aesthetic, the two women embraced various different identities and challenged many norms, in the process revealing the performativity of gender. Initiating a dialog between the two artists' perspectives, these books bring together for the first time Blumenschein's drawings with Ottinger's photographs from their joint performance sessions.