ROGER MELIS
Almstadtstraße, Berlin, 1976
© Nachlass Roger Melis / Mathias Bertram / Courtesy Kicken Berlin
Biography
Roger Melis (German, 1940–2009) was trained as a photography apprentice in Potsdam between 1957 and 1960. In 1962 he was employed by the hospital Charité, located in East Berlin, as a scientific photographer, and simultaneously took his first portraits of writers and artists, including Peter Huchel, Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, Wolf Biermann, Franz Führmann, and Heiner Müller. From 1966 onwards he worked for several East German magazines, and in 1968 took his first photographs for the GDR fashion magazine Sibylle, for which he kept working until it closed down in 1995. In 1965 he was one of the founding members of the DIREKT group of photographers, and between 1981 and 1989 acted as the co-initiator and chair of the Photography Working Group in the VBK-DDR. Between 1978 and 1990 Melis taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (Berlin Weissensee Art School), and from 1993 to 2006 at the Lette-Verein in Berlin.
