Critical Distance

Born in East Germany and having lived longer, by now, in the United States than in united Germany, the starting point for “Critical Distance – a perpetual absence of home” was my rather ambiguous relationship to any kind of geographically, emotionally or culturally definable home. (Engl.)

My sense of home seems to be a fleeting one. So, I sought to capture it in photographs and thereby accumulate the semiotic rather than tangible manifestations of belonging while letting them be filtered by the critical distance of an expatriate and legal alien respectively. It is important to me that these images are viewed—or should I say ‘read’—less as mere photographs but rather image-text combinations and montages, from the front cover all the way through to the index. Walter Benjamin asked in his book “Einbahnstrasse” why books cannot be like catalogues. I would like to add, why couldn’t a series of photographs be like a novel or textbook, a book like a film, and a film like a hypertext? There is pleasure in exploring various and complex levels of viewing and reading. My intent is to be as generous as possible to a wide ‘audience’ by providing more than just pictures, but rather one’s musings and findings in text and image about home and belonging.