Oliver Heisch, born May 29, 1971 / Duisburg-Rheinhausen
Growing up on the Lower Rhine, behind a coal mountain - which we children used to play football in summer and toboggan in winter - in the shadow of the Krupp steelworks in Rheinhausen and the Bayer chemical company in Uerdingen, I developed an interest in photography when I was young.
In the beginning I chose b / w photography and portrayed friends and family members.
A formative background for my later interest in the exploration of social phenomena was the six-month-long industrial action of steel workers in Krupp Stahlwerk Rheinhausen in 1987/1988.
The events in Rheinhausen raised awareness of social realities and polarities in every respect. The then works council, Helmut Laakmann, rose to become the leader of the steel workers after his speech of the riot and the KRUPP boss and today's multi-supervisory board member Gerhard Cromme was pelted with eggs by angry steel workers.
As a chronicler of the international jazz scene and independent music scene in Cologne from the end of the 1990s to the mid-2010s, he created documentaries in the form of stage and studio portraits of the who's who of the jazz world and freely improv
