„and in the middle, me“

Home. It is the static antithesis of mobility and globalization; the symbol of rootedness, identity, security, and intimacy. We usually equate home with our place of birth, the site of our earliest formative influences and sensory experiences. It fulfills our longing for a sense of attachment to place, for orientation, perspective, a feeling of getting down to the basics. In the face of humankind’s “transcendental homelessness,” the idea of home takes away the feeling of alienation from the modern world. Or at least it seems to. Home is also a non-place, non-existent, a projection and a utopia; it is flexible, amorphous, individual, and lost forever. In her search for identity, photographer Esther-Judith Hinz found powerful images that evoke diverse associations and meanings while visually deconstructing the idea of home as a mental construct.

In her search for identity, photographer Esther-Judith Hinz found powerful images that evoke diverse associations and meanings while visually deconstructing the idea of home as a mental construct. By attempting to define her own individual position, Esther-Judith Hinz gradually separated herself from the places of her past, and her photographs became experiences situated in the present. In them, she dissects her sense of her own roots, breaking it down into individual components: landscapes, portraits, still-lifes. The places and people remain nameless and undefined, leaving the viewer free to make her own connections or associations. In a sense, the viewer can adapt Esther-Judith Hinz’s images of home. In this process, home loses its aura of the self-evident and instead appears as something that has to be rediscovered and redefined over and over again.