Espen Eichhöfer made the photographs in *Papa, Gerd und der Nordmann* between 2009 and 2019, and they circle a question he does not try to settle quickly: where does one come from, and what counts as home. Born in eastern Norway to a Norwegian mother and a German father, raised in the Ruhr, and now based in Berlin, Eichhöfer returns to the Norwegian landscapes and households he first knew as a child on holiday and later visited with his own family. His relatives, friends and acquaintances stand before the camera; the long darkness of winter, the unbroken light of summer, the houses and the wide terrain of eastern Norway form the backdrop.
This is Eichhöfer’s first photobook, and it arrives with the weight of a particular institutional and professional formation behind it. He is a member of the OSTKREUZ agency, and the book was published in connection with the agency’s group exhibition *Kontinent – auf der Suche nach Europa* at Kunsthalle Erfurt, on view from 24 October 2021 to 23 January 2022. Hartmann Books issued the volume in 2021 in cooperation with Skald Verlag in Norway: 120 pages, 52 illustrations, hardcover, 30 by 27 centimetres, with texts by Felix Hoffmann and Eichhöfer himself in German, Norwegian and English.
What distinguishes the work is its refusal to choose a single register. Some pictures hold to documentary description; others slide toward the surreal or take on a romantic cast, and this shifting temperature is the point. The personal material is never merely private. Eichhöfer’s own lineage becomes a way of asking how home, identity, descent and national pride are being argued over in Germany and across Europe now, and the sequencing he and designer Katharina Lemke have given the pictures keeps the intimate and the public in the same frame.
The trilingual apparatus matters for a collection too: German, Norwegian and English texts place the book in more than one reading context at once, and the Norwegian co-publication acknowledges that the subject straddles two countries rather than belonging to either. For a collector attentive to how German photography has handled questions of origin and belonging, and to the book as a considered object rather than a portfolio of single images, this is a substantial early statement by a photographer whose editorial intelligence is already visible in it.
