Home by Magnum Photographers
A new book and major touring exhibition sees 16 Magnum photographers examine the concept of ‘Home’, resulting in a complex and often poignant portrait of a very personal subject.
What does home look like to you? This is the question posed by a new project created by 16 Magnum photographers, from Elliott Erwitt to Olivia Arthur, Thomas Dworzak to David Alan Harvey, in collaboration with the Fujifilm Corporation.
The resulting images, as you might expect, are wildly varied. A number feature small children or elderly parents – indicative of the fact that home is most often tied up with notions of family; that it is, as the cliché goes, where the heart is. Several of the photographers chose to examine the actual buildings that they call home, sometimes from afar, others looking in extreme close up at details that would otherwise usually be missed.
Photography is often a peripatetic career, attractive to those who are keen to live a nomadic lifestyle. This, alongside the fact that most Magnum photographers are more used to photographing the lives of others rather than their own, made it an unusual and potentially challenging project for those taking part.
Writing in the introduction to the book accompanying the project, Magnum Photos Curator Pauline Vermare explained: “Many chose photography precisely because they needed to venture away from a home in which they felt they didn’t quite belong: resilience meant rejecting it, travelling to other places, meeting other people – using the camera to escape.
“For some, the difficulty of this project was rooted in a lingering feeling of dislocation: the fact of having more than one home, and the yearning to document them all. Others chose not to settle in any one particular place, and had to search for their own definition of the word. To a few, the return to childhood was indeed an emotional endeavour, and home was therefore a surprisingly difficult subject to document. But for all, exploring the notion of home in such a personal way was a welcome challenge.”
The results of the Home project can be seen in a book and an exhibition that is touring London, Paris, Tokyo and Cologne this year. Shown here are extracts from the work of four of the photographers featured: Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Trent Parke, Olivia Arthur and Chien-Chi Chang.
Home will be at the Vinyl Factory in London from May 18-27; home-magnum.com