Stephen Gerard Dietemann

Hearth and Home

The Hearth and Home series investigates my life using family ‘snapshots’ and photographs of residential architecture — taken both from my childhood and today — from my vantage point as both artist and architect.    The ‘hearth’ series is simultaneously historical record and commentary; like everyone’s childhood, it was a mixture of fear, joy, discovery, all set in the mixture of awe and powerlessness characteristic of childhood.  The ‘home’ aspect exists as both ‘home’ — shelter, protection, personal identity — and ‘house’ — commodity, social signifier — but these digitally altered photographic images attempt to pull the rich and varied psychological identity underpinning both external identities.  In creating these amended photographs,  I am encouraging the viewer to do what I did as I made them: to re-appraise their own assumptions regarding ‘hearth and home’.