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.

The ability of pictures to undermine aesthetic standards and call artistic conventions into question is central to the research projects of the art historian Jurgen Muller, to whom this volume commemorating his sixtieth birthday is dedicated. Numerous essays by longtime colleagues provide new interpretations of well- and lesser-known masterpieces, in which the initial impression is frequently turned into its opposite. Jurgen Muller has held the professorship of medieval and modern art history at the TU Dresden since 2003. He has written authoritative monographs and studies on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio, and edited a wide range of scholarly anthologies and exhibition catalogues. He has become known far beyond academic circles through his editing of volumes published by Taschen Verlag about the films of various decades.