Elisabeth Niggemeyer

The Süddeutsche Zeitung printed one of her photos out large in the newspaper's weekend edition, prompting an assignment by Süddeutscher Verlag for the production of an entire book on Munich, das münchner jahr, 1955. She continued to publish city portraits in photo book format: London. Stadt, Menschen, Augenblicke in 1956, and Bonn im Bild, in 1957.

In 1958, Elisabeth Niggemeyer and her husband Peter Pfefferkorn moved to West Berlin, where she took pictures for reports in women's magazine Constanze and its successor Brigitte.

Friedrich Luft's review of her Munich book[4] brought Niggemeyer's work to the attention of Berlin journalist Wolf Jobst Siedler, who was looking for a photographer to take pictures that illustrated his writings on contemporary city building. In 1965, Siedler, Niggemeyer and journalist Gina Angress jointly published Die gemordete Stadt ("The Murdered City"). In his essays, Siedler criticizes modern city building and urban renewal, which led to the demolition of entire neighborhoods built before World War I. These were replaced by monotonous apartment blocks visually bereft of any elements without functional purpose. What World War II had not fully accomplished, was now apparently completed and seized as an ongoing opportunity for standardization.[5]

Elisabeth Niggemeyer's photos offer striking evidence thereof, confronting lush decorum found in Berlin's fin-de-siècle architecture with the dreariness of its contemporary neighborhoods.[6] In the words of one critic, "the result was devastating."[7]

While Niggemeyer's pictures visualize Siedler's lament, they are in turn amended by documentary text-bits Gina Angress compiled, and that sometimes achieve a comical, spiteful effect.[8] Die gemordete Stadt, re-published in 1979 and 1993, has been called the most influential book on architecture in post-war Germany.[7] Its effect has been linked to that of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities in the United States and Canada.[7] The year after its initial publication, a film on the topic was produced by architectural critic Ulrich Conrads.[9]

21 years later, in 1985, the three contributors edited a follow-up titled Die verordnete Gemütlichkeit (Mandatory Cosiness). This book reviews two decades since Die gemordete Stadt made its first public impact, years during which architecture and city-building shifted from modernism to historicism, a.k.a. post-modernism. Elisabeth Niggemeyer’s pictures aim to show that decorating modern cityscapes with copies of artifacts abolished thirty years ago makes for an out-of-place comeback, since the decor's environment was irrevocably lost.[10]

Since 2000, Niggemeyer occasionally lived in Paris, taking forays into the entire city while photographing for "Paris Puzzle", a series of paperback volumes each dedicated to one of the 20 arrondissements. They offer detailed and often collaged views of the city's architecture (2014/2021).

After marrying Peter Pfefferkorn, Elisabeth Niggemeyer gave birth to three children. In the early 1960s the family moved to Zehlendorf, a suburban district of West-Berlin, where the children, along with students and teachers from Germany and the U.S., attended the John-F.-Kennedy-School. Here, Elisabeth Niggemeyer met and made friends with American teacher Nancy Hoenisch and began taking pictures of children during preschool classes. These pictures turned out to be a key element of the book Vorschulkinder, published at Ernst-Klett-Verlag in 1969, in cooperation with Nancy Hoenisch and psychologist and educationist Jürgen Zimmer. [11] The book was reprinted four times and became a classic of preschool pedagogics. Bridging kindergarten and elementary school, preschool teaching is shown as an attempt at enabling children to make hands-on first experiences of understanding, e.g., early science, while promoting children's independent thinking and assessment. In close cooperation with Antoinette Becker, Elisabeth Niggemeyer made more photo books on similar topics at Klett and Otto-Maier-Verlag Ravensburg, the latter publishing a book series dedicated to "Ich und die Welt" (Me and the World). The volumes address outstanding situations in the lives of children, e.g. a stay at the hospital, or school enrollment. The last books for and about children (e.g. Mathe-Kings, 2004) were again jointly produced with Nancy Hoenisch, again about preschool experiences, and were presented to children and grownups at action exhibitions.