Peter Bialobrzeski began the Die zweite Heimat project five years after his earlier Heimat, setting his navigation system to avoid the Autobahn and driving through Germany in search of ordinary existence. He visited small and medium-sized towns, larger cities, suburbs, and city centers, asking how and where Germans actually live and how most citizens experience the country’s reality. The photographs gathered here are composed with care, but their subject is not spectacle. They describe the social terrain of a nation on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of reunification.
The book does not rely on images alone. Henning Sußebach contributes a text on places, non-places, and memories of the German concept of home, giving the sequence a discursive counterweight. In the artist’s statement, Bialobrzeski invokes Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places and Walker Evans as reference points, and expresses a wish to formulate photographically what the present day might look like once it is past. That ambition shapes the book’s tone: attentive, unhurried, and alert to the way ordinary settings carry history.
Hartmann Books publishes Die zweite Heimat in a clothbound hardcover printed with foil stamp, 23 by 28 centimeters, with 148 pages and 78 illustrations. The text appears in German and English. Graphic designer Andrea Rauschenbusch is responsible for the book’s design, and the publisher lists an accompanying limited edition. The volume was published in 2017; exhibitions were held at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in 2017–18 and at the Forum für Fotografie in Cologne in 2018, with further venues planned.
For readers drawn to contemporary German photography, the book offers a sustained inquiry rather than a survey. It follows a single artist’s project across regions and settlement types, and it pairs that visual research with an essay that considers what Heimat means now. Its subject—how a country lives when no one is performing for the camera—remains timely, and the collaboration between photographer, writer, and designer gives the object a coherence worth returning to.
