Corn, scrap yards and stables - the photos by journalist Gerhard Kromschröder show Emsland beyond the tourist clichés. The exhibition "Expeditionen ins Emsland - Ein deutscher Bilderbogen" can now be seen in the Oldenburg University Library until 31 October.
Gerhard Kromschröder has a long relationship with the Emsland region. He began his career as a local editor at the Ems-Zeitung newspaper in the 1960s. During this time, he took pictures which he published in 2005 in the volume "Emsland Schwarz-Weiß".
For "Expedition ins Emsland", Kromschröder travelled to the region around Papenburg, Meppen and Lingen and photographed an Emsland beyond the tourist clichés. His pictures show people at work, houses, shooting clubs, flocks of sheep and scrap yards - beautiful and desolate landscapes that reveal the consequences of modernisation.
But Kromschröder's pictures are controversial: What the journalist and photographer sees as a "declaration of love with a sting" has not gone down well everywhere. When he recently presented his photographs to the public for the first time, Hermann Bröring (CDU), honorary district administrator of the Emsland district, accused him of an "unfair and polemical portrayal of Emsland". Bröring and District Administrator Reinhard Winter (CDU) did not attend the opening of the exhibition at the Moor Museum in Groß Hesepe. The duration of the exhibition was also shortened. The exhibition "Expeditionen ins Emsland - Ein deutscher Bilderbogen" can now be seen in the Oldenburg University Library until 31 October.
Kromschröder was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1941 and studied German language and literature, sociology and art history. From 1963 to 1967, he was a local editor at the Ems-Zeitung newspaper, where he caused a stir with his research and reports on the region's Nazi past and the Emsland camps. He lost his job as a result of this reporting. Kromschröder then worked for the satirical magazine Pardon. In 1979, he moved to Stern as an editor, where he was Middle East correspondent in Cairo and Baghdad, among other things. The journalist and photographer currently lives in Hamburg.
