For historians, some of her most interesting pictures deal with daily life during the years of postwar reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Rolf Richter, a journalist who was also a close friend of the couple, recalls that Renate was often the more adventurous of the two when it came to selecting locations.

For the rest of her life Renate's body carried the phosphorus scars from the skin burns she received that night.

[6] Student contemporaries included the man who later became the academy's long-standing director, Bernhard Heisig, the sculptor and graphic-artist Wolfgang Mattheuer, the painter Werner Tübke and Günter Rössler, who would later gain fame (or notoriety) for his pioneering work in nude art photography.

[8] The Rössings' active career ran for approximately 55 years, most prolifically in Leipzig itself,[7] and in Dresden, but also of cities, landscapes and people in Romania,[9] Bulgaria[10] and Hungary.

[12] Although they started out as photo-journalists, supplying newspapers and magazines, over time there was an increasing emphasis of publishing books containing photographs of people, scenes and places.

[7] There are suggestions that in the end approximately 90 volumes were published: the Rössing Foundation website makes mention of "over 100 books and written works in which it is pointless to [try and] separate out the contributions of Renate and Roger".