Hardly any other photographer has illuminated the East Germans and their world for so long, so intensively and in so many facets as Roger Melis (1940 - 2009). For three decades, the co-founder of East German photorealism travelled from Berlin to the GDR, a country that he often perceived as "silent" and frozen under the rule of the SED. In atmospherically dense, often symbolic photographs, he documented the everyday life of people in the city and countryside, their working and living conditions, but also the more or less voluntarily performed political rituals under real socialism.

Melis' haunting photographs of writers and visual artists made him famous in both East and West in the 1960s. Many of his portraits of authors, such as Anna Seghers, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Sarah Kirsch and Wolf Biermann, went on to shape the "face" of East German culture [in newspapers and magazines, in books and calendars, on posters and record sleeves] and are now classics of the genre. With the same care, Melis portrayed people from almost all social backgrounds, workers and factory managers, farmers and forestry workers, craftsmen and tradeswomen, children and "half-stars", functionaries and dissidents.

The retrospective curated by Mathias Bertram is the first comprehensive exhibition of Roger Melis' work in Dresden. With 150 photographs, it shows a cross-section of his portrait work as well as exemplary examples from his reportages, many of which were commissioned by Roger Melis himself, including early photographs from Dresden and Meissen.

Also on show for the first time in more than 30 years is a visual sociogram of the artist scene in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, which was created in 1989 and is accompanied by the portrait book "Die Künstler vom Prenzlauer Berg", published by Lehmstedt Verlag to mark the exhibition.

The exhibition and catalogue are a cooperation project between the Leonhardi Museum Dresden and Galerie Pankow, Berlin.