PETER BIALOBRZESKI
DIE ZWEITE HEIMAT

Peter Bialobrzeski (b. 1961) is one of the most famous and internationally successful German photographers today. His new series Die zweite Heimat will be shown from 8 September 2017 to 7 January 2018 in the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg as the first exhibition in the new series Hamburg Heroes.

Die zweite Heimat is the continuation of his project Heimat, first published in 2005. Between 2011 and 2016, Peter Bialobrzeski traveled through Germany and returned with 30,000 photographs of places and non-places. He spent time in Andernach, Berlin, Bottrop, Eisenhüttenstadt, Hamburg, Hagen, Haßloch, Meißen, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Wolfsburg, and especially the wide expanses in between, these foreign yet familiar places, with their rows of garage doors, street lamps, and gas stations, as Henning Sußebach describes in the accompanying book published by Hartmann Books.

With this series, more than thirty years after Steven Shore’s famous publication Uncommon Places, Bialobrzeski has attempted to compile a photographic inventory of the German condition. He himself speaks of "exploring the social surface of Germany."

"So homeland: What is it? And where? In Germany these questions are debated in sometimes mind-opening and sometimes ugly ways. Especially in the era of globalization, this word is a means of self-discovery for some and distancing for others. It is used for political purposes, to sell publications, earn money, and usually elevate or denigrate something or someone. Almost always when people are arguing over the idea of homeland, it is about the arguers themselves, their view of the world and others − but not the object of the homeland itself," writes Sußebach, the author of the book.

The exhibition Die zweite Heimat includes a total of forty color photographs from between 2011 and 2016, a prologue with fifteen older works from Germany in color and black and white from between 1983 and 2005, and a selection of works from the series Heimat (2005).

With this showcase exhibition, the loose sequence will open the series Hamburg Heroes (idea and concept by Ingo Taubhorn), which features outstanding works by photographers who are based in Hamburg and work internationally from here.