Rudi Meisel, born in 1949 in Wilhelmshaven and raised in Osnabrück, studied photography in the class of Otto Steinert at the Folkwangschule Essen and in 1975 founded the group collective of photographers VISUM , together with André Gelpke and Gerd Ludwig. From 1971 onwards he worked as a freelance reportage photographer for magazines including Spiegel, ZEIT, stern, Time, Newsweek, Merian, GEO, ZEITmagazin.
“Yet despite the wall and the barbed wire, the FRG and GDR are in fact extraordinarily similar in terms of their petit bourgeois nature, their uniformity, architecture and habituality. Conservative comfort, inhospitable residential developments, neighbourly chit-chat, boozy get-togethers in bars, youth rebellion, entertaining folk festivals, streets in disrepair – over a period of eleven years, the West German photographer Rudi Meisel captured the everyday life of the common people on both sides. His photo-journalistic documents merge to create a unique, historical archive, causing the viewer to be confounded and amazed by the similarity of the subject. What is really particular to the West or to the East? Often it is the captions that first enable classification with certitude. ” C/O Berlin Foundation
Half-cloth hardcover; 24 x 30 cm; 132 pages; 91 duotone illustrations; English, German; texts: Felix Hoffmann, Hans-Michael Koetzle; design: Naroska Design
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag