Biography

In the mid-seventies he began to study the history of photography. First he discovered the daguerreotype and made this earliest photographic technique known beyond specialist circles for the first time with a groundbreaking cover story in "Stern.

His black-and-white pictures of sporty women in back view for John Player Special were hung on the wall by those who didn't know how to steal a Pirelli calendar.

Werner Bokelberg was one of Germany's great photojournalists and for a time the most widely published photographer of all.

In late autumn 1964 he visited Romy Schneider in Paris. "I want to go back to Germany," the multi-part report in "Stern" would later be called. She let Bokelberg know that she was ready to be photographed as she had never been seen before. She changed clothes maybe thirty times during the afternoon. He took more than three and a half thousand photos that afternoon.

He came from a generation of photographers for whom almost nothing was impossible. He once lived among the homeless for four or five days and secretly took photos for the magazine "Neue Illustrierte". Another time he photographed Ira von Fürstenberg half naked in the bathroom. It sounds a bit like it was stolen from the script of "Blow-Up". But there are the pictures.