Roger Melis

Roger Melis (20 October 1940 – 11 September 2009) was a German photographer specialising in portraiture, photo-journalism and fashion photography. 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. "Melis [in his photography] combines the documenting power of August Sander with the awareness of class distinctions of earlier German photo-portraitists and the graceful artistry of Henri Cartier-Bresson, to penetrate every-day experiences." "Melis verbindet die registrierende Strenge eines August Sander, des frühen Porträtisten der deutschen sozialen Stände, mit der graziösen, artistischen Aufmerksamkeit eines Henri Cartier-Bresson für die Sensationen des Alltags." Peter von Becker in Tagesspiegel "The output of Roger Melis – the black-and-white photographs – which recall, through their clarity and arrangement, the carefully structured compositions employed in the paintings of the old-masters, show a completely different world and quite different people from those presented in [the German Democratic Republic's] published press images. Melis understood how to wait until the elements seen through his lens came together so that their individual subjects, the human beings, showed up in the viewfinder as they really were." "Die Arbeiten von Roger Melis, schwarz-weiße Fotografien, die in ihrer Klarheit und ihrem Bildaufbau an die durchdachte, sorgfältige Komposition alter Gemälde erinnern, zeigen eine andere Welt und andere Menschen als die in der staatlich gelenkten Presse veröffentlichten Fotos.