fotoheide photographs of europe

Until I married and left Germany in 1963, I was Heide Soltsien and my business name was fotoheide. Many of the images in this collection, and for my first book “Fotoheide”, were taken between 1954 and 1963. I returned to Germany in 1979 to take shots of my home town Hameln, for the publisher C.W Niemeyer of another book “Lebendiges Hameln, some of which also appear in this collection. In 1994 I was commissioned by the German Government, to photograph Germany for a travelling exhibition called “Germany Revisited”. This entailed two trips, one in summer, one in winter, travelling throughout Germany. And in 2013 Brian and I returned to Europe to take a few more shots.

These images are really important to me for several reasons. There is obviously the nostalgic aspect of remembering friends and scenes from my youth, and the fascination of glimpsing once again Germany, as it was over 50 years ago. It is also a reminder of how fortunate I was to receive such a thorough introduction to photography. To read more about those early days of my professional career, here is a link to an extract from a lecture I gave entitled; A Photographers tale