Over a period of four years, photographer Vincent Kohlbecher visited Poland, the country of his childhood, again and again. He found motifs there which took him back to that time, to the Catholic faith, through German history. Gdańsk, Warsaw, Kraków, Płaszów, Majdanek, and Auschwitz… Kohlbecher’s photos are like texts longing to be read carefully. The places he describes in his photos are only accessible to the viewer through the interplay of what he has seen, what is associated with it, and historical memory. The photographer remains all the while at a distance, never becoming part of the narrative, and succeeds in taking a rare analytical and sharply focused look at this country which is still the most unknown neighbor to Germany.
Vincent Kohlbecher, who was born 1960 in Hamburg, worked as a photojournalist for German and international magazines in the 1990s and has taught photography at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since 2003. ‘Its Flower Is Hard To Find’ is his first book publication. The book was a cultural recommendation of TV broadcaster 3Sat. GoSee : 3sat.de//kulturzeit/buch-tipp-vincent-kohlbecher-its-flower-is-hard-to-find & hartmann-books.com//vincent-kohlbecher-its-flower-is-hard-to-find
‘Its Flower Is Hard To Find’ by Vincent Kohlbecher . Design: Stefan Stefanescu, Berlin and Vincent Kohlbecker, Hamburg . Texts by Wislawa Szymborska and K. W. Woycicki . Hardcover, printed linen, 104 pages, 55 illustrations, 22 x 31 cm . ISBN 978-3-96070-056-2, Hartmann Books