Help Me I’m Blind
HELP ME, I AM BLIND records an exchange of photographs and writings between Heidi Specker in Australia and Theo Deutinger in Rotterdam.
Photographer Heidi Specker spent 28 days in Sydney in 2009 as artist-in-residence at Sydney College of the Arts. While there, she sent daily images to writer and architect Theo Deutinger – spurring him to speculate about this unseen life and resulting in the poetics of divergent responses.
The resulting collaboration of texts and images formed the exhibition HELP ME, I AM BLIND.
Heidi, an award-winning Berlin-based photographer, has her work featured in international museums and galleries. Theo, based in Rotterdam, has an international reputation for his provocative essays on globalisation.
Heidi said they wanted audiences to see that they could lose their blindness about what’s around them through the eyes of another.
“HELP ME, I AM BLIND” is a quotation from Theo’s text about imagination. “The title refers to the flood of images all around us to ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’”, said Heidi.
“My pictorial language in this project uses photographic depictions that we think we know, that we think we’ve already seen. This should be read in an art historical context because many pictures employ classical motifs.”
Heidi Specker
Award-winning photographer Heidi Specker lives in Berlin. Her works features in international museums, institutions and galleries, as well as well as public and private collections. Her art books include IM GARTEN/CONCRETE (2005) and BANGKOK (2006). With the travel photography in HELP ME I, AM BLIND, she presents coloured landscape photography in a new objectivity.
Theo Deutinger
Austrian writer and architect Theo Deutinger is based in Rotterdam. He combines architecture and urban design with research, visualisation and conceptual thinking. He gained international recognition with his Snapshots of Globalization, a series of graphical essays which are part of a long-term study that eventually embodies the climax of the globalising world. His most well-known essays are European Central Park; Adi, Audi, Aldi and Firewall.