Städteländer

(2021 - 2023)

Among quiet fields, I encounter distance shaped by memory.

Städteländer is a photographic exploration of belonging, memory, and the fragile relationship between identity and place.

As a child, I grew up in a small rural village where I found freedom in wandering through fields and forests, yet rarely felt I truly belonged. After twenty-five years of living in the city, I returned with my own family to a village much like the one I had left behind. Although the landscape felt familiar, so did the feeling of being an outsider.

Rather than searching for answers directly, I began to walk. Through familiar roads, woodland edges, fields, and overlooked places, I discovered that the landscape carries more than physical traces. It also holds the emotional weight of lived experience. My photographs explore how places quietly awaken memories and shape the way we understand ourselves.

People are largely absent from these images, yet their presence remains tangible in what they have left behind. At times I enter the frame myself. These self-portraits are not intended as portraits in the traditional sense, but as attempts to negotiate my own place within a landscape that feels both deeply familiar and strangely distant. They reflect a longing to belong, while acknowledging the uncertainty of whether that belonging can ever be complete.

Together, the landscapes and self-portraits form a personal journey through memory, estrangement, and reconciliation. Städteländer is not an attempt to resolve the past, but to inhabit it differently—to discover that the places we return to continue to shape who we are, even as we search for a place we can truly call home.