Title: Dragos Hanciu - HOMETOWNPublished by: Paper Traffic, Bucharest
Release Date: 2017
Contributors: Dragos HANCIU
Genre: photobook
Pages: 98
ISBN13: 978-973-0-25599-7
13500 HUF
Hometown is a visual research about migration, identity, homesickness, and about what happens to the places where we grew up while we make a life someplace else. The book itself beholds scars of distance being assembled mostly on Skype, between 4 European capitals. This is the visual story of the Romanian photographer Dragoș Hanciu and other tens of thousands of people who annually migrate from their homelands with no prospects to go back. Dragoș, now a pass-byer, has been silently wandering around his hometown for the last 6 years; he observes from distance and takes photos of places that hold something from the past & serve as postcards in the future.
The atmosphere from the photographs gives us the impression of a silent sleepwalk in a surreal, contradictory post-industrial landscape mixed with the architecture of a 7th-century-old city. The images are embedded with the lo-fi kind of texture which gives memories an oxymoronic sense of materiality. The photographs are inhabited by an ineradicable feeling of familiarity, because they represent other small, depopulated Hometowns.
