Ellen von Unwerth. Heimat

German folklore is a minefield for a camera. The dirndl, the beer hall, the Alpine meadow, the blonde braid: this imagery carries a century of baggage, some of it tourist kitsch and some of it far darker, and most photographers sensibly leave it alone. Ellen von Unwerth walks straight in. Heimat, the German word for homeland, is her attempt to reclaim the visual language of where she grew up and hand it back as something mischievous instead of menacing.

It mostly works, and it works because she never lets the folklore stay earnest. She photographs from inside the tradition rather than above it, and that matters. She modeled for a decade before picking up a camera in the late 1980s, and the switch left her with a specific sympathy for women being looked at, visible in the way her subjects hand the gaze right back. The women wear the costume and own it. A milkmaid smirks. A pair of braids becomes a prop in a joke the model is plainly in on.

The biography is not incidental to the pictures. She spent those modeling years in front of other people's cameras, mostly men's, learning exactly how the machinery of being desirable gets assembled and where it chafes. When she switched sides she kept the knowledge and dropped the deference. Her women are seldom passive surfaces to be arranged; they are collaborators in a joke about desire, and the difference shows in a raised eyebrow, a hand on a hip that is daring, not displayed. The prize she took in 1991 for a Guess campaign made the reputation, and the sensibility has barely wavered since.

The eroticism is real, and it is authored by the person being photographed, which has been the through-line of everything from those launching campaigns to the sprawling survey in Fraulein. The craft holds up too. She moves between grainy black-and-white and candy color without losing her voice, and she shoots with a snapshot looseness that keeps the staged scenes from stiffening into catalog work. Look at how she handles a group shot, a table of women mid-laugh with a man shrunk to a prop at the edge; the composition quietly inverts who usually gets to be the subject.

The printing rewards the approach. TASCHEN gives the color spreads a saturated punch and lets the black-and-white pages keep a newsprint grain, and the shifts between them pace the volume like a night that keeps changing rooms. A spread of a woman in full Bavarian dress astride a motorcycle does more than a page of essay could: the costume says tradition, the pose says escape, and the photograph refuses to choose.

The conceit has a ceiling. One theme, pursued across a whole volume, begins to repeat, and by the later spreads the Alpine props (the steins, the feathered hats, the lederhosen) feel like a costume box being emptied more than a world being explored. The provocation that lands hard on the tenth page softens through familiarity. The strongest of these images would hold up pulled out of the theme entirely; the weakest need the costume to carry them. Set it beside the wider range of Fraulein and this narrower outing looks charming, not essential.

Treat it as a companion, not an introduction. The playfulness is genuine, the printing is lush, and the German setting gives her usual games an edge of real cultural friction. Come for the wit, and start where the range is wider. Then let Heimat sharpen the joke.