Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2008, Thekla Ehling’s Sommerherz follows her children as they grow, using color photography to attend to situations, pauses, and shifting moods rather than to construct a conventional family chronicle. The book’s subject is intimate, but its method is deliberately open: the pictures record experience without resolving what, beneath consciousness, may connect memory, perception, and the formation of an identity.

Ehling’s images often isolate a young figure within an apparently ordinary moment. Gazes become inward, almost trance-like; a present event seems to meet something already remembered. This tension gives the work its particular emotional register. Childhood is neither idealized nor explained, and the family photograph becomes a site of uncertainty—one in which recognition depends as much on the viewer’s own associations as on the scene depicted.

The project is informed by the premises of family photography, while Ehling identifies Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra as reference points. That lineage is useful not as a prescription for reading the book, but as a clue to its sustained attention to portraiture, adolescence, and the charged distance between camera and subject. Sommerherz was also shown at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles in 2007, placing the series within the photographic culture of its period without reducing it to an event record.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a focused study of how a photographic sequence can transform private observation into a shared, unresolved experience. The 30.5 × 22.9 cm hardcover format gives the color images room to retain both their quietness and their psychological pressure. Credited to Ehling as photographer, with Christoph Schaden also listed as a contributor, this 9783868280357 edition offers a considered encounter with a body of work that treats growing up not as a narrative of milestones, but as a field of fleeting, difficult-to-name impressions.