Jakob Eckstein

I grew up in the USA with German parents, live in Germany today, and regularly return to the USA to visit friends and family. I am of both of these countries, but also perpetually split between them, never fully belonging to one or the other. While I have always felt at home in both places, I have also always felt alienated from them. “Stranger at Home” is a photographic project that seeks to capture, examine and communicate this tension between familiarity and strangeness, belonging and alienation.

In its current form, “Stranger at Home” is a collection of photographs that I have been consistently adding to since the summer of 2021. I carry a small digital camera with me at all times to act upon the impulse to photograph whenever it strikes. Like someone examining their own thoughts, I am drawn to things that seem intimately familiar, and yet still inscrutable and even ominous. As a result, “Stranger at Home” is an amalgamation of a wide range of subjects, including street scenes, detail shots, friends and family, and rural and urban landscapes. Despite their variety, my photographs are bound together by aesthetic tendencies like dense, meticulous compositions, juxtapositions of movement and stillness. But above all, these images are unified by the feeling of persistent, familiar strangeness they all exude.