He is an artist, photographer, and professor based between Hamburg and Berlin. His practice focuses on socio-economic and political themes, combining photography, video collage, and installations through a research-driven and subjectively narrative approach. He has worked in numerous countries, including Iraq, Ukraine, Syria, Nigeria, China, and India. Holding a Master’s degree in Photography, he has received international awards such as the World Photography Award and the International Photography Award, and has been nominated for the Prix Pictet and the Leica Oskar Barnack Prize. A member of the German Photographic Academy since 2016, he founded the “Format” photography lab in Hamburg. Since 2024, he has been a professor of artistic photography at the University of Arts in Darmstadt.
Kowitsch – Lonely are all the Bridges, by German photographer Robin Hinsch, represents the fourth chapter of Homecoming, an exhibition cycle dedicated to contemporary photography. The project was conceived by Irene Alison and curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci. The event is organized in collaboration with Forma Edizioni and Infoto Firenze Association, with the support of Gruppo AF and Banca Ifigest. Is there still a possible way to photograph war? Is there a visual language capable of conveying trauma, violence, and conflict in a world saturated with images—where the complexity of contemporary warfare seems to have outgrown the interpretative… of traditional photojournalism? Does photography still carry a responsibility to question how we tell stories of pain? But above all: do images of horror make us more aware of the horrors we are capable of generating? And does this awareness help us, in any way, to prevent them?
With Kowitsch – Lonely Are All The Bridges, Robin Hinsch opens our eyes to the devastation of a war zone where only ruins remain. He does so with the clarity of someone who has chosen a side—the side of the defeated—and the humility of someone who has no absolute truths to proclaim, but knows how to take a stance of quiet listening.
In his images—part of a long-term investigation into the Ukrainian conflicts begun in 2010 and still ongoing—war takes on the face of an exhausted soldier slumped on a bench, the outline of a ghostly snow-covered landscape, the jagged silhouette of a cathedral gutted by bombs. With this solo exhibition, the journey around the idea of home that underpins the Homecoming cycle turns into a bitter reflection on the absence of any home left to return to: destroyed, bombed, abandoned, the houses in Kowitsch – Lonely Are All The Bridges are inhabited only by ghosts.
And yet, the frescoes Hinsch creates possess a hypnotic, vital beauty that goes beyond the mere contemplation of catastrophe. In the surreal silence that envelops them, they return to us all the echo of war’s senselessness—and all the fragile hope for a future that can take root even when “home” is nothing more than a pile of dust.
We need these images. More than fifty years later, John Berger’s 1972 critique of the “photography of agony”—that once the initial shock wears off, such images “lose all political impact and become an accusation against everyone and no one” – still resonates strongly. As does Susan Sontag’s famous argument that the spectacle of others’ suffering numbs us, and that “the vast photographic catalog of misery has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible appear more ordinary, familiar, distant, and inevitable.”
But far from the (often) suffocating immediacy of photojournalism, Hinsch’s images instead open a space for thought and understanding. They are no less painful than those that linger on the most unbearable atrocities of war, but in their slower tempo, in their apparent detachment, they show how awareness is a long process – and how history, often, can only teach us something when seen in perspective. As we look at them, we are stunned by the destruction they bear witness to – but precisely because they do not leave us breathless with horror, we are left with the breath to search within them for clues to help us understand the world we live in and the wars we are still fighting.
