Steve Braun
NONE OF US / KEINER VON UNS | The term home has repeatedly been the subject of ambitious photographical examination. What is home to us? Who actually is „us“? Is it even possible to answer this question collectively? Possibly not because the key to the understanding of this word primarily depends on the personal,the individual and biographical experience.
Steve Braun´s biography shows the contrariety of the concept of home and its danger of inner strife. He moves between east and west, city and countryside, between tradition and change and, for the last years, he has been trying to condense his conflicting emotions in a photography project concerning his pomeranian home village.
Over and over again, he comes back, and he takes pictures of relatives, neighbours and distant acquaintances. It is a journey to his past as well as a journey to the very edge of his identity. To what degree is a person defined by his or her roots? The everyday life of the village, being shaped by unemployment and rural exodus, attracts and repels him simultaneously.
Steve Braun grew out of this scenario, but is connected with it nonetheless. His project illustrates the two sides of the coin: the desolation and the lack of prospect, but also the idyll of the countryside which, on one side, is glorified through the eyes of a child, but is also relentlessly traced under the look of the mature photographer on the other. In any case, it offers an ambivalent perspective and a rather different one on this tract of land compared to the one the media commonly offers. (Text: Johannes Kersting) www.stevebraun.biz
