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Jan Oelker was born in Dresden in 1960 and grew up in Cottbus. He studied power plant engineering and worked at the Technical University of Dresden until 1990. He has been working as a freelance photojournalist since 1991. The relationship between humans and the environment, particularly in the context of energy conversion, became his primary focus.
The transformation of the landscape caused by lignite mining in Lusatia continues to hold an ambivalent fascination for him to this day. Yet he recognized renewable energy as a forward-looking topic early on. Ever since the first wind turbines in Saxony were connected to the grid in 1992, Jan Oelker has been documenting the development of wind energy with his camera. He works for various trade journals, associations, and companies. His photo essays have appeared in magazines such as GEO, Stern, and p.m.-Magazin. He documented the history of wind energy in the book he edited, *Windgesichter – Aufbruch der Windenergie in Deutschland* (Sonnenbuch-Verlag, Dresden, 2005). In 2006, he received the “Germany Has Infinite Energy” journalism award from the Agency for Renewable Energies for his GEO feature “Strategic Game Around Wind Power.”
A second focus of his work is travel photography. Jan Oelker has traveled to over 40 countries on four continents. However, his most important travel destinations are consistently in the East. Since the mid-1980s, he has visited the countries of the former Soviet Union more than 25 times. Having grown up in eastern Germany himself, he is particularly interested in how the transformation of these societies affects people’s daily lives and how they are coping with the process of breaking free from the legacy of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, Jan Oelker traveled several times to Kamchatka and the Chukchi Peninsula for various photography and book projects. Other destinations in Asia included the United Arab Emirates and Oman (2005), China (2008, 2009, and 2011), Mongolia (2013), Iran (2016), and Japan (2018).
Jan Oelker is part of the volunteer curatorial team at Galerie nEUROPA (Kultur Aktiv e.V.) and a member of Freelens e.V. as well as the German Journalists’ Association (Deutscher Journalisten-Verband e.V.).
Photo: Dorothea Prang