Oliver was born and raised in Mainz, Germany, and became first infected with the virus of photography by his father’s Canon AE-1. After moving to Hamburg, he started working for the SPIEGEL ONLINE Picture Desk in 2004. He became a picture editor there after finishing his studies of “Media and Information” in 2007 and was deputy head of the department between 2009 and 2016. During that period his focus was on international and domestic news and politics as well as documentary photography. He edited the “pictures of the week” on the SPIEGEL-Website for a couple of years and is now responsible for sports photography at spiegel.de.