German photographer (born 1930)
Elisabeth Niggemeyer (23 June 1930 in Bochum, Germany) is a Berlin based German photographer. Niggemeyer is best known as the photographer for "Die gemordete Stadt" ("The Murdered City"), a classic critique of post-war German urban planning, and for her work on children and pedagogy created in collaboration with Nancy Hoenisch.
Life.
Elisabeth Niggemeyer's parents ran a retail photo shop and laboratory in Bochum. After finishing school in 1950, she started vocational training as a photographer at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen in Munich, following the wishes of her parents. She showed little interest in the technical aspects of photography, until she discovered her interest for photo reportage while covering Oktoberfest.
After graduating in 1952, and a disappointing foray into fashion photography, Elisabeth Niggemeyer remained in Munich, working in a photo shop and taking pictures of urban scenery with her Rolleiflex camera during free time.
Photographic work.
City and urban life.
 
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 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.
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. In the words of one critic, "the result was devastating."
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. "Die gemordete Stadt", re-published in 1979 and 1993, has been called the most influential book on architecture in post-war Germany. Its effect has been linked to that of Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in the United States and Canada. The year after its initial publication, a film on the topic was produced by architectural critic Ulrich Conrads.
21 years later, in 1985, the three contributors edited a follow-up titled "Die verordnete Gemütlichkei"t (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.
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).
Photography and pedagogics.
 
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. 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.