Where is Home?
“Returning Home: Tone Stockenström's documentation of the immigrant experience hits a little closer to home this time. Having moved to America from Sweden when she was six, Stockenstrom journeys through the camera's lens to her homeland to negotiate her connection to relatives still in Scandinavia. This rich photographic exhibit is a great excuse to check out this cultural landmark in Andersonville.”
Funding by The American-Scandinavian Foundation, The Swedish-American Museum, The American-Swedish Institute, The Jack Jaffe Documentary Grant, Tamron USA, Lightwork Art Residency in Syracuse New York.
“Where is Home? Having always treated the subjects of her photo-documentaries with sympathy, insight and graciousness, Tone Stockenstrom sharpens her virtues in her most demanding challenge thus far--an expedition of self-discovery to her native Sweden where she encounters her familial relations through the lens. A world traveler and adventurer who has visited thirty countries and has called the U.S. home since she was six, Stockenstrom returned to her roots in search of her identity. Incapable of egotism, she found what she always does--distinctive personalities that she renders with nuanced emotion. We do not have to know the nationality of her subjects or her blood relation to them in order to connect with their individualities; an old woman with a bandaged cheek, who happens to be Stockenstrom's aunt Monika, wears an incredibly complex expression of youthful wonder and resigned wisdom--the distillation of her life.”
Michael Weinsten - New City Review
“The exhibition presents more than 40 color and black and white pieces representing generations of people close to the photographer. Often she is the subject, though we cannot always tell, as the pictures come from different stages of her life as well as the lives of others. The confusion is appropriate, for as we search for the identity of the people pictured, so did the photographer search for what ( and who) made up her own. The process is less to piece together a life that one can see whole than to collect as many fragments that reflect but a part of who once was or has become.”
— Alan Artner - The Chicago Tribune
