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.

[2] 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.

[3] 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.

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[4] 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.

[5] 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.

"[7] 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.