Thank you to those who posted up ideas for my homeland competition last week, your suggestions made interesting reading.

I’ve decided to give the prize to Daniel Shea who put forward a project by the young American photographer Adam Golfer and specifically his project called kin*.

Although Adam’s project doesn’t deal directly with his own homeland (he grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC) it does relate to his identity as a Jewish American and is closely associated with his family’s history. The work is ongoing and the images on his website form the foundation of his project.

Adam went to college in Baltimore and moved to Brooklyn in the spring of 2008. Since then he’s been working as a freelance photographer. His pictures have appeared in W Magazine and Culture+Travel. This past summer, he traveled through Germany for seven weeks, starting work on a documentary about the land and the young people there. He’s currently applying for grants which would allow him to travel to Israel in the Spring of 2009 to continue working on the next chapter of the project. The aim is to photograph in both Germany and Israel, ultimately bringing the two parts of the project together as a book.

Here are a selection of photographs from kin* (the work is titled as such because ‘kin’ is “an acknowledgment of a connection, a shared experience/history…but there is an asterisk attached because it is not as simple or straightforward as that…we aren’t family, but there is a definite bond which exists”). Below, you can read what Adam told me about the work.

kin* by Adam Golfer

“My project kin* brought me to Germany to investigate a part of my family’s history that I’ve always been fascinated by. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and although they were not German, they were displaced and brought to concentration camps in Germany during the war.

For a long time I struggled to come up with a way to explore this topic without being overly sentimental or relying on a history of victimization. I’ve seen so much photography attempt to deal with Germany in a melodramatic way, depicting grainy black and white imagery and deserted, stark landscapes without sunlight or signs of life. It is almost always expressed from a specifically Jewish point of view.

However I was concerned with a different side of Germany, one that addresses the 3rd generation of people removed from the Third Reich. My intentions were to meet other 20-somethings (like myself) to see how they live their lives. There is a commonality, a bond between who I am, as a Jewish American, and who they are as Germans. History ties us together, and I went to Germany to see if this bond would manifest itself in person. It was my own way of approaching a land that I had always scrutinized and felt a certain paranoia towards.

The subject matter is very general, but also extremely personal and specific to me. My experiences were very reliant on the incredible people I continued to meet over the course of my trip (two months). As I moved through the country, I thought a lot about Robert Frank’s experiences working on The Americans. How he had some big ideas about themes he wanted to convey, but much of the project was left open.

The work is certainly in progress, as I plan on traveling back to Germany and to Israel to investigate a much deeper relationship between Germans and Israelis, sixty years after World War II.

As a Jewish American, I have a very complex relationship to Israel. Culturally, I feel incredibly connected to the land, and having visited almost four years ago, I feel a need to go back to spend more time there. Israel is fascinating because there is a direct overlap between Judaism as a cultural group, unified into an international group after the Holocaust, and Judaism as a religion/faith. I align myself much more with the secular/cultural side of things. Spending time in Israel was a spiritual experience, but it had little to do with god, and everything to do with history. To be around structures thousands of years old in the Old City, in Jerusalem is mind boggling. History is in front of you everywhere you look.

I was trying to explain my fascination with the two countries to a friend before embarking on my trip this summer. I said something to the effect of: ‘My heart belongs to Israel and my mind belongs to Germany.’

Every Jewish person has conflicting feelings about Israel, Germany or both. Some go to Israel and feel nothing. Others never have any desire to go to Germany, because of the horrific history. My interest in both countries is a direct result of these sentiments. I was determined to draw my own conclusions about Germany, pushing aside all of the stereotypes I had developed, and see for myself.

My focus on meeting young people there my own age comes out of the idea that we are two generations removed from the Holocaust. Therefore we are much more capable of seeing the bigger picture and looking at things with a bit of perspective. I believe there is something inherent in Israel, something which ties it to Germany. There is an ancient history there, and also a young nation founded in the ashes of genocide and death. Something about the relative youth of the country and the deep and complex history of the Jewish people fascinates me.

It is a complex relationship. Since WWII the two societies have developed almost as complete opposites; Israel, a country founded on Zionist, nationalistic principles, establishing a powerful military, and post-war Germany, under the microscope of the world, developing into a somewhat pacifist, anti-nationalist state. There is an intrinsic, undeniable link between the two nations. Both peoples share the mind-set of ‘never again’ but from two distinct sides.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under EASY RIDER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.