Heidi Specker. Damme: Ausst. Kat. Oldenburger Kunstverein, 2020

The photographer returned to spend a summer in the hometown of her childhood, Damme in southern Lower Saxony. Damme is surrounded by an agricultural landscape of industrial monoculture. At the time of the photographs, the fields were full of maize. Heidi Specker took portraits of pupils at the high school and positioned these figures and faces alongside brick architecture, with bunting and brass musical instruments, subtly evoking rituals, to form a visual essay of 70 photographs.
The theme of human and animal is biographically and historically reasoned and updated in text and image through a personal commentary from the photographer. The book deals with our own biography, which has become increasingly problematic these days, in terms of animal husbandry, particularly in this region, and global climate change.