German photographer Sibylle Bergemann (1941-2010) made her living in fashion photography, but it was with her portraits of everyday life in East Germany over the 45 years of its existence that she gained acclaim. Nonetheless, she managed to make even her fashion photography subversive by East German terms, creating brilliant flares of color against uniform gray backdrops. “It’s the fringes of the world that interest me,” she famously declared, “not its center. The non-interchangeable is my concern. When there is something in faces or landscapes that doesn’t quite fit.” Well suited to such concerns, Polaroids have always occupied a place of affection within Bergemann’s oeuvre; in these pictures, the artist captured more ephemeral moments and images than is typical of the rest of her oeuvre. Collected here for the first time, they record a vision without comparison in European photography.