Uwe Gerig

Uwe Gerig (born May 15, 1940 in Nordhausen ; † late 2018 in Quedlinburg ) was a German photographer , journalist and author .

Life

Gerig's journalistic endeavors made themselves felt early on. At the age of 14, his first small articles were published in the local SED newspaper. After graduating from high school in 1959 and two years of voluntary military service in a special unit of the National People's Army , he studied from 1961 at the only training facility for journalists in the GDR , the so-called Red Monastery of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . There he became a party member of the SED in 1964 and finished his university education in 1965 as a qualified journalist. He was then hired by the party to go to Erfurt as a photo reporter and worked for the SED district newspaper “ Das Volk ”.

During the Prague Spring in 1968, Gerig was expelled from the journalists ' association after allowing himself to make a derogatory remark about the recently deceased chairman of the GDR State Committee for Broadcasting, Gerhart Eisler .

Gerig then became a freelance photographer. He photographed for the international horticultural exhibition (iga) in Erfurt, as well as plants and flowers for the product catalog of a seed breeding company. In 1969 he became a member of the Kulturbund and honorary director of the photo amateurs in Erfurt. For the 20th anniversary of the GDR, Gerig organized a photo exhibition: Family life in new apartments, happy pioneers, soldiers, etc. The exhibition received recognition from the SED district leadership. From 1973 Gerig was a reporter for the "Neue Berliner Illustrierte" (NBI) on a freelance basis and delivered text / photo reports primarily from the southern districts of the GDR.

In 1983 he and his wife managed to escape to the Federal Republic of Germany on a tour group trip to Yugoslavia. In Frankfurt am Main Gerig was a reporter for the tabloid "Abendpost-Nachtausgabe" from 1984 until it was discontinued in 1988. On the day of reunification, he founded the Ruth Gerig Verlag in Königstein / Taunus together with his wife Ruth and published around 70 tourist books by 2000 about regions in the new federal states.

plant

Gerig saved around 3,000 of the slides and negatives he had created from his archive from the State Security by sending packages with selected negatives and color slides to friends in the West before fleeing. The remaining almost 80,000 originals were destroyed in July 1986 according to the destruction protocol in the Stasi files .

For the 25th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall , Gerig designed the official photo exhibition of the federal government with his photos of the inner-German border.

In 2007/2008 the German Photo Library of the Saxon State Library - State and University Library Dresden ( SLUB ) took over the extensive collection of the photo journalist. The archive contains 75,000 small picture color slides, 10,000 medium format color slides , 25,000 black and white small picture negatives and 25,000 digital images. This inventory covers the period from the 1970s to the present day and consists of photographs from current events in the GDR and numerous travel photos from a wide variety of countries.

Exhibitions

• Official photo exhibition of the federal government on the 25th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, Bonn (1986)
• "Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall", organized by the Volkshochschule, Rheine (1999)
• Iga horticultural exhibition, Erfurt (1968)
• "Freedoms!", Geisa (2009)
• Poster exhibition "20 Years of Peaceful Revolution and German Unity " (2009/10)
• Photo exhibition TATORT photos of a crime in Germany. The wall 1961-1989. With 80 photos of the inner-German border and the Berlin Wall on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Wall. April – July 2011 in the Mosse Palais (Deutsche Gesellschaft) Berlin, August / September in the Thuringian state parliament in Erfurt, November / December 2011 in the Haldensleben district office, April – July 2012 in the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in Mödlareuth / Bavaria , September – December 2013 in the Memorial of the division of Germany in Marienborn, June – July 2014 in Oebisfelde Castle.

bibliography

• On the way in another Germany , 1986, Umschau Verlag Frankfurt
• Concrete and iron barriers , 1986, Röhr Verlag Krefeld
• Correspondence , 1987, Tykve Verlag Sindelfingen
• Afghanistan war against children , 1987, Tykve Verlag, Sindelfingen
• The refugee tragedy of the Khmer people , 1987, together with the Prince of Hanover
• Red God in “Paradise” , 1988, pictorial documentation about North Korea
• Murders on the Wall , 1988, Tykve Verlag, Sindelfingen
• Wir von Drüben , MUT Verlag, 1989
• Panama , 1990, picture-text documentation
• Memorable pictures from a lost republic , 1999
• Germany. Fading landscapes , 2002
• STASI called me “Reporter” in 2009
• Evil obituaries. Trauma German Wall , 2011
• Travel pictures from the EAST , 2012
• Quedlinburg - a move in Germany , Shaker Media, Aachen 2012
• Silent victory after ninety days. Protocol of self-liberation in divided Germany , Shaker-Media, Aachen 2013

In addition, from 1990 on, Uwe Gerig wrote about 70 travel guides about East Germany, Slovenia, Tyrol and other regions.

Web links

Commons : Uwe Gerig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Further information on Uwe Gerig in the Deutsche Fotothek
• Pictures by Uwe Gerig in the Deutsche Fotothek
• Visiting the dictator. Report on Uwe Gerig's photo report from the famine in Ethiopia 1984–1985 . In: one day from April 13, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The exhibition in the Marktkirche shows pictures of the upheaval in 1989 in Quedlinburg
2. ↑ Uwe Gerig in the Federal Foundation for Work-Up