Roger Melis - Paris zu Fuss (GDR/DDR PHOTOBOOK) - 1985

EXCELLENT, VERY BEAUTIFUL book about Paris by German Roger Melis (1940-2009) -
one of the most famous photographers from the GDR/DDR, specialising in portraiture, photo-journalism and fashion photography.

Mentioned here:
Hans-Michael Koetzle, Eyes on Paris, page 364/365.

TRUE EARLY EDITION FROM THE 80ties - not to mix with the much later re-edition.

"Paris on Foot‘ was Roger Melis’ first independent book publication. And - after Fred Wander's 1967 title - it was probably the most important contribution by a GDR photographer on the subject. GDR citizens at the time were not able to travel - at least not to Western countries. And access to Western literature was also difficult. Against this background, the image-shaping function of the titles mentioned can hardly be overestimated. Whether Melis' book catered to the fantasies of buyers and readers or rather irritated them in their latent longing for Paris must remain speculation. In any case, working on the book changed the photographer himself. ‘After Paris,’ says Melis, ’I suddenly had an uplifting feeling, I wanted to dress differently, move differently, I breathed more freely and resolved not to let the dreariness infect me any more. [...) Ridiculous perhaps, but anyone who remembers certain rude, stale manners in the GDR, those unavoidable inattentiveness in all that rising grey, knows what I mean."
(Hans-Michael Koetzle)

Welcome to the auction by Anatole Desachy (France) and Ecki Heuser (Germany) in honor of Paris. To celebrate the 27th edition of „Paris Photo“, the biggest event for photography worldwide, we have gathered 27 photobooks about Paris, each.

IF YOU WIN MORE THAN 1 OF MY BOOKS IN THIS AUCTION, YOU WILL PAY ONLY 1 X SHIPPING COSTS -WORLDWIDE.

Volk und Welt, Berlin. 1988. First edition, second printing.
First printing was published in 1986.

Paperback (as issued). 240 x 270 mm. 176 pages. 160 photos. Photos: Roger Melis. Layout: Jörg Brosig. Text: Stephan Hermlin. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside fresh and clean with no marks and with no foxing; first five pages with neat dog-ear at the top right corner, no other remarkable flaws or defects. Outside fresh with little trace of use; creases at the bottom of the rear side (does not have consequence for inside), like so often yellowed at the spine, no other remarkable flaws or defects. Overall fine, better than usual condition (very often the rear cover has scratches and the covers very often are more or less heavily used).

Great East-German photobook by Roger Melis about Paris.

"Roger Melis was born during the early part of the war. His father was the sculptor Fritz Melis. Melis grew up in the household of his stepfather, the poet Peter Huchel, initially in western Berlin and from 1952 in Wilhelmshorst near Potsdam which had ended the war in the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany, and was by now part of the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany). Between 1957 and 1960 he undertook an apprenticeship in photography, which was followed by six months working at sea. In 1962 he took a post as a technical photographer at the Charité (university hospital) in Berlin.
1962 was also the year in which he started to build a portfolio of portrait photographs of various poets and artists: this was part of a book project concerning the division of Germany, but the project would remain unrealised. In 1966 he produced his first work for the magazine "Merian", and his first fashion photography appeared in the popular fashion and arts women's magazine "Sibylle" in 1968. That was the year in which he set up house with the fashion journalist Dorothea Bertram, and the two of them were married two years later. 1968 was also the year in which he became a member of the state sanctioned League of Visual Artists (VBK / Verband Bildender Künstler), after which he was able to work as a freelance photographer. A year later, together with various other high-profile photographers including Arno Fischer and Sibylle Bergemann, he established the Photographers' Group known as "Direkt". He was a co-founder and, from 1981, the chairman of the Central Photography Working Group at the VBK. He also held a teaching position, from 1978 till 1990, at Berlin's Weißensee Arts Academy.
Melis made his reputation as a fashion photographer, notably for Sibylle, a fashion magazine, and for more general photo-reportage that appeared in publications including the "Neue Berliner Illustrierte", "Wochenpost", "Die Zeit", "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and "Geo". Above all he was known, in east and west alike, for powerful portraits of leading literary and artistic figures including Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, Thomas Brasch, Wolf Biermann, Franz Fühmann, Heiner Müller or Sarah Kirsch.
In 1981 Melis found himself banned from further work with the East German press. He had recently undertaken a joint project for GEO with the novelist Erich Loest. Loest had been campaigning against censorship and by the end of the 1970s was subject to a sustained programme of persecution by the authorities. In 1981 Loest managed to escape to the west and some sources indicate that it was working with Loest shortly before this that led to the ban on Melis. Other commentators, noting the stark realism with which some of his photo-journalism documented the less glamorous aspects of daily life, think that the ban on his press work came about from nothing more obscure than the failure of Melis to sugar-coat his photographic reportage in order more closely to align with the state's official image of itself. His publisher, Mark Lehmstedt described the photographs as "a testament to the scepticism and resignation of the people of East Germany... [but they also celebrate] ... their pride, their endurance and their desires". The press ban on Melis lasted until the German Democratic Republic fell in 1989. He now concentrated on exhibition work and books.[6] His volume "Paris on Foot" (published by "Volk und Welt", Berlin 1986) sold 40,000 copies, making it one of the country's most commercially successful volumes of photographs.
After the reunification of Germany he was able to return to photo-journalism and portraiture, contributing in particular to "Wochenpost", "Die Zeit" and the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", gaining a wider audience now across the whole of Germany both for his new works and for his photographic output from the communist years.
In 2007 the Lehmstedt publishing house in Leipzig issued the first in a four volume set of books documenting East Germany through the lens of Melis. With the first volume, entitled "In a quiet country" ("In einem stillen Land"), Melis was one of the first to present a wide-ranging portrait of the German Democratic Republic and the people who inhabited it. Positive critical reaction was widespread: in a review headed "Behind the time-wall", Die Zeit acknowledged Melis as "the Master of East German photorealism".[10] The second volume appeared in 2008 and was devoted to some of his large accumulation of "Künstlerporträts", portraits he had taken over 40 years of artists including, notably, literary figures from the GDR period.[11] "At the Edges of Time" ("Am Rande der Zeit") followed in 2010, a photographic compendium on village life in the German Democratic Republic."
(Wikipedia)




"What photographers usually look for in Paris is a state of exception, be it static in the form of constructed superlatives or moving in the form of those ‘decisive moments’ for which photographers such as Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson provided the blueprint. The special thing about this book is the virtual absence of anything special. Be it in terms of form and aesthetics or content. In other words:
No extreme angles or perspectives, no deliberate rule-breaking or other strategies that suggest any kind of ‘artistic will’. But also no (almost no) anecdotes of the kind provided by ‘Photographie humaniste’ in particular. Roger Melis' street theatre is one without a plot, without a real event. What we see is everyday life, or more precisely, everyday life in Paris in 1982 in its most normal, unexcited, unspectacular form. And this is precisely what makes this book, first published in 1986 by the East Berlin publishing house Volk und Welt and designed by Jörg Brosig, so special. The understatement is the programme, or rather: the deliberate artlessness of the concept. Melis does not censor reality according to a pre-formulated strategy, but allows it to pass through his camera lens as unfiltered as possible. Melis' photography has “nothing conspicuously purposeful, intensely focussed”, remarks Hans-Dieter Schütt.
‘He can only be seduced to a very limited extent by effects and chirpy compositions. It lacks any excess of meaning.’ The everyday dozen, according to Schütt,
‘This is precisely Melis' profession: photographing today what you could also photograph next Thursday.’ What at first glance looks like a lack of formal-aesthetic orientation is actually a deliberate anti-concept.
Knowing that Paris is ‘photographed to death’, as Stephan Hermlin puts it in the foreword, Melis - and the title itself announces this - swaps the role of the photographer striving for pictorial harvest with that of the flâneur, who decidedly does not aim for a destination, does not submit to any purpose. ‘The flâneur's path must really resemble nothing more than a walk,’ says Melis, ’and certainly not anywhere near a business that needs to be done. It is only by wasting time in this way that we arrive at the crucial intermediate area: A lot could happen now, but nothing has to happen.
With this book, I want to make you want to go for a walk!’
In spring 1982, Roger Melis (1940-2009) travelled to Paris for the first time. It was the 41-year-old photographer's first ever trip abroad. A citizen of the GDR in Paris: that alone is exceptional enough. Accordingly, Melis noticed things that a cosmopolitan saturated with events and images would no longer notice: People waiting, talking to each other, crossing the street. That also happens in the East. But perhaps the extras of a nameless street theatre in cosmopolitan
Paris operates a little differently. In any case, compared to the monochrome GDR, Paris must have seemed like a firework of colours to the photographer.
But Melis' pictures are black and white with a tendency towards a grey that levels things out.
And they are extremely quiet pictures, pictures into which, as Melis says, ‘you have to listen.’ These are shots in which, for the most part, nothing happens, but - paradoxical as it may sound - this is precisely the strength of a book that explores the mostly overlooked incidental between the Paris titles, which are either endeavouring to affirm or provoke. Or, to put it in the words of Hans-Dieter Schütt: ‘Melis gives the things of life guidance from the margins.’
(Hans-Michael Koetzle)