Sarah Grethe Approaches the Subject of Returning Home through her Mother's experience.

The German photographer accompanies her mum to the place where she grew up, embarking on an emotional journey depicted through daily life moments and objects.

"Sometimes the sky above us is open" seeks an examination of the concept of home. I accompany my mother's return to where she grew up: a farm in southern Germany. In the confrontation of an idealizing view and the distance from the actual place today, tensions between familiarity and strangeness, constancy and change become visible. They clarify how home and origin can both carry and constrict.

The initial point for me was to ask what kind of person my mother was and what kind of life she had before I entered hers. We searched for the past in the present. I embarked on a figurative search, so the objects became emotional representatives and are associatively linked to the sensations she has had and still has today. The title refers to a quote from a letter my mother sent to her parents in 1999. When she found it again while doing research for the project, she couldn't believe that she wrote the letter herself, as a metaphor for the changes that have taken place over the years.

How does home change for a person when she hasn't lived there for a long time? And when she returns? Words and pictures by Sarah Grethe

Sarah Grethe is a photographer, born and based in Hamburg (Germany). The focus of her work is on the dependence of the past versus the present in the context of her personal environment. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum. 

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.