Heidi Specker Damme

Heidi Specker

Heidi Specker is one of the most important figures in contemporary photography. In her works, which are for the most part serial, the photographer’s subjects range from architecture and various objects to people. Following her photographic explorations of urban space, she has now returned to Damme and dedicated a series of seventy photographs to her native city.

In Damme, a Catholic city in the south of Lower Saxony, normality prevails. Individual snapshots of a landscape consisting of asphalt, concrete, and brick convey a sense of anonymity and desolation; monocultures and wind turbines testify to structural change.

The photographer focuses on the young people she encounters at her former high school, who are caught in a privileged state of suspension between daydreams and hopes for the future. These works are a personal look back at classroom camaraderie, school friends, and first dance lessons.

By proxy, Specker’s works speak of momentous change and retrospection, and provide an inkling of how her own stages and paths in life once intersected here. These are images of the place where it all began: this is how it must have been, or something like it.