First Journey Home [Signed]

Kominek Books, 2013

20.5 x 28.5 cm
96 pages
54 duotone reproductions
Hardcover
Edition of 500 copies

First Journey Home brings together photographs taken during Misha Kominek’s first solo journey through Poland in the summer of 1997.

Having just graduated from photography school in Barcelona, Kominek returned to his homeland with a new confidence in his camera. Aside from family visits to his grandmother after the fall of communism in 1989, he had not been back on his own since emigrating to Germany at the age of twelve with his family in 1982.

The book recalls permanent emotions and fleeting sensations alongside fragments of everyday life. The photographer visited fruit markets, fields and villages, historical sites and unfamiliar cities, travelling from his hometown of Gliwice to Auschwitz and Warsaw.

He photographed both the familiar and the unknown, attempting to track down forgotten friends, uncover hidden childhood memories, and create new emotions and illusions. Throughout the journey, he tried to understand how he would have felt if he had never left his country, and how life might have been if he had stayed in Poland now that returning was once again an option.

First Journey Home is a tale of a man’s romantic return to his homeland, the garden of his childhood. It is a captivating homage to that fleeting moment of excitement and melancholy that inspired him to continue his photographic journey ever since.

Above all, it is about the journey itself: the wistful longing, the passionate yet impossible desire to recover one’s former innocence through insignificant details and black-and-white photographs.

Imbued with humor and irony, this intimate confession of youthful illusions under the summer heat becomes a lasting statement on the enduring story of European emigration and the longing for a sweet life.