Background information
"The photographs in Fatih KURCEREN's volume 'Pithead' attempt to perceive the Ruhr region as a place where identities and firmly established social structures are dissolving. For more than 150 years, the region between the rivers Ruhr and Lippe has been shaped by immigration and the encounter of diverse cultures. The much-cited structural change does not seem to be happening for these people. Yet the people are not to be shown as mere victims of social grievances, but as actors in their own life plans.
Content
Fatih KURCEREN - himself an immigrant - directs his unbiased view on the region and its inhabitants in the photo book 'Pihead'. To do so, he moves along the blurred edges of a society whose center seems just as unclear as the questions about its norms, about its inside and outside, and about what is foreign and what is its own. It is the people themselves who are placed at the center, and who are seen in casual stagings and observations as the ones who recreate their selves and their surroundings from moment to moment." (slightly adapted text, © Tobias ZIELONY)