Arno Fischer (1927- 2011) holds an important place in the history of German photography of the 20th century. During his career he was working across the photographic genres: he shot fashion models on the streets of Eastern European cities as well as ordinary citizens and their everyday lives in the Eastern Bloc. He travelled to Equatorial Guinea, India, the Soviet Union and the United States with his camera in hand. When not traversing the streets Fischer was an active member of DIREKT, a group founded in East Berlin in 1965, which significantly influenced the diversification of East Germany’s visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Together with his wife, the photographer Sibylle Bergemann, Arno Fischer also maintained contacts with international photographers. Colleagues as Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and René Burri were always happy to visit them in their apartment on Schiffbauerdamm. As a lecturer, Fischer also mentored students, first at the Hochschule fü r Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and later, after the fall of the Wall, at the Ostkreuzschule fü r Fotografie und Gestaltung.