Trivia

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.

In 1965 he met Salvador Dali in Paris. You can now photograph me as I stroll through the city stealing something, the artist is said to have offered him, or you can visit me in Spain - the only condition: "Bring a blonde with you!" Bokelberg chose the Danish actress Lotte Tarp, with whom Dalí celebrated an eccentric happening for days, even on the dining table. "There wasn't much to do," says Bokelberg, "I just had to take photos." In the end, the wonderful illustrated book "DaDaDali" was created.

He designed a new type of advertising in which completely un-German humor and eroticism came together.

At the age of 19 he wanted to become a comedian and therefore enrolled at the State Drama School at the Wiesbaden Conservatory, where he took courses with Axel Ivers and Robert Kleinert.

He lived and worked in Hamburg, Paris and New York.

Bokelberg started taking photographs early. At sixteen the first cover photo: Christine Kaufmann. And when Bravo magazine called him the "star of tomorrow," he was not yet twenty.