First Journey Home - Special Edition

First edition book in a custom-made folder, with a tipped-in image on cover.

Includes a signed and numbered silver gelatin print in 20 x 28 cm.
Choice of 5 different prints.
Each print in an edition of 10.

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 romantic return to one’s homeland, the garden of childhood. It is a captivating homage to the moment of excitement and melancholy that inspired Kominek’s lifelong dedication to photography.

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

Filled with humor and irony, this intimate confession of youthful illusions under the summer heat becomes a lasting reflection on the enduring story of European emigration and the search for a sweeter life.