Kerry Kilburn Weekly Artist Post 4/18/2016

Claudia Heinermann

Claudia Heinermann

From "The Death Camps"

From "Resistance Fighters"

From "Remembering Srebrenica"

From "Wolfskinder"

Claudia Heinermann is a freelance photographer born in Germany in 1967 and currently living and working in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede from 1986-1991, then later became interested in documentary photography and proceeded to study at the Fotoacademie Amsterdam from 2004-2006. She is now a free-lance photographer who specializes in long-term documentary projects that emphasize 20th century history, particularly war and its aftermath around the world. She has participated in solo and group exhibits throughout the Netherlands and has published five of her projects as photobooks.

One of her best-known projects is Wolfskinder ("Wolf Children"), which earned her the Kaunas Photography Gallery Residency Award in 2014 (read more about the project here). The Wolfskinder were children who fled Eastern Prussia during WWII, many of whom wound up living wild in the forests. Her series includes portraits of living Wolf Children, their homes and the regions where they live, and landscape photographs of the forests where they live, taken during different seasons of the year. This general approach - combining portraits, images that provide a sense of events, and landscapes that provide a sense of place - characterizes all of her series, which range from coverage of various topics from WWII to topics from the war in Bosnia-Herzegovnia to the Rwandan genocide.

While each of Ms. Heinermann's photographs stands on its own, her particular strength is in the way she puts series together. I was nearly in tears the whole time I was perusing her website, both because of the power of her individual images, and also because of the synergy she achieves by combining seemingly disparate images into potent wholes. Her portraits are full of feeling, which she achieves by getting to know her subjects, and she builds startling contrasts between appalling scenes such as mortuaries full of decaying bodies and seemingly serene landscapes (that are really the sites of mass graves). I can't recommend her work highly enough!