HEIMAT–01A photographic project
HEIMAT
After the Distance
OSNABRÜCK REGION · BEGINNING 2026
What does Heimat look like after being away for so long?
After many years abroad, I returned to the landscape of northwestern Germany.
HEIMAT — After the Distance is my way of looking again at the Artland region: its fields, forests and farms, its roads and villages, and the marks left by weather, work and time.
Coming back does not mean finding everything as it was. Time changes a place, and it changes the person looking at it. Somewhere I remember well can suddenly feel strange.
Then an ordinary road, a row of trees or the edge of a field can feel completely familiar. I make these photographs somewhere between those two feelings.
No nostalgia.Heimat in the present.
I am not trying to record every part of the region or make rural Germany look more beautiful than it is. This is not a nostalgic idea of Heimat. It is about the place as it is now, shaped by farming, building, daily life and change.
Hedges, forests, paths.
Traces of weather,
work and time.
HEIMAT–03
HEIMAT–05The Artland landscape is not dramatic. You have to take time with it. I notice the large skies, changing weather, mist over a field, hedges between farms, dark woods and old buildings that are slowly losing their original use.
These are places we can pass every day without really seeing them. Photography makes me stop and look again.
I know this region because I come from here, but I also see it as someone who has been away for a long time. Living abroad changed the way I look at Germany.
The southern light and open landscapes I knew there have stayed with me. Back in the north, I find a quieter light, more structure and a different mood.
I am not trying to make traditional landscape pictures or illustrations of the region. This is a personal record of returning and asking what Heimat means to me now.
HEIMAT–06Signs of People
People are often present without appearing in the photographs. You can see them in ploughed soil, worn paths, farm buildings, planted forests and roads.
Sometimes one person appears in the distance. They are not the main subject. They simply show the scale of the landscape and how briefly we move through it.
Fine-art prints.
Exhibitions.
Photobook.
An ongoing project about coming home and seeing a familiar landscape again.
I want HEIMAT — After the Distance to grow into a complete body of work, with signed fine-art prints, exhibitions and eventually a carefully made photobook.
I can also put together groups of photographs for places that belong to the region, including hotels, cultural institutions, businesses, practices, offices and private homes.
In these spaces, the photographs do more than fill a wall. They bring the nearby landscape inside and connect a place with the people who live, work or stay there.
People from the region may recognise something of home in these photographs. For those who have moved away, the pictures may bring back memories.
For someone seeing the region for the first time, I hope the work offers a reason to look more closely at a landscape that is easy to overlook.
HEIMAT — After the Distance does not try to define where home is.
It asks a simpler question: what is still there, and what has changed, when we come back?