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Back in March I received an email from Rotem Rozental, content developer and researcher at The SIP, asking if I was interested in collaborating with their blog: “I would like to post one of your photographic projects, along with a short text by you, delineating your inspirations, motivations and aims.”
I received the mail while on charter holiday with my 3 year old. It was the kind of holiday where you walk around inside a cloud a lot of the time and feel exhausted even though you go to bed at 9 pm every day.
The SIP contacting me was a nice surprise. I never feel certain how people find me. More than once I have been so bad at writing about what I do, selecting the right work for the right forum, that nothing ever came of it. If you have ever spent time on my website, you may have noticed that editing is not what I am best at. I take a lot of photographs, I shoot mainly based on my intuition, and I do not really like talking about my photography.. It’s easier talking about other peoples work. I would say I relate very well to this and this – and off course, less surprisingly, this too.
With that in mind, I was a little uncertain of what the SIP wanted from me, and what I should show them. In the end Rotem suggested I show a project from 2008, In Search of Lost Time, and once I started writing about the images, it seemed to fit in well with my dissertation on The Paradox of Photography, which I am currently writing. The focus is on the relationship between photographs and reality.. I am trying to understand better what photography is and what it does for us on a basic level. I am not just interested in art photography, but also in vernacular, snapshot photography. So far the thesis begins with a quote from Walter Benn Michaels closing essay from James Elkins: Photography Theory, The Art Seminar (2007):
“It is precisely because there are ways in which photographs are not just representations that photography and the theory of photography have been so important. Indeed, we might say that it is precisely the photograph’s complicated status as a theoretical object that has made it so important in art. And it is precisely the efforts of photographers to establish them as pictures that have made photography so crucial.”
For me all this is related to how we experience the world, and thus it’s also connected to last years Flesh Machine project. Anyways, here is what I sent to The SIP. There is a slightly different version on their blog. I hope some of you find this interesting and can relate to it.. You are very welcome to add your thoughts and comments!
In Search of Lost Time
Rooms once decorated and occupied; albums and torn up photos found in a nursing home bin, an indication of a life documented.
Odette was born in the outskirts of Paris on the day The Great War broke out. Her mother died a few years later, and her father married his brother’s widow, as was customary in those days. As a young woman Odette moved to Copenhagen where she met and married a Jewish businessman from Poland. In 1942 they had a daughter, my mother. In 1944 they fled to Sweden, where they lived till the war was over. In 1960 Odette was widowed, and she spent the second half of her life living as a wealthy, independent woman, travelling the world.
In the final years of her life Odette lost her memory, leaving her oblivious to who the people around her were, but still remembering the time in the 1960s when she bought the fabric that decorated her room; curtains, pillows and bed cover. She died in a nursing home, July 2006, on my 30th birthday.
I am not sure exactly what story I am telling, except it is one of conflict and loss.
Once photographed by Man Ray, Odette’s hands, transformed by age, are now here.
The history of my involvement with photography starts with the family album. Many of the family photographs that fascinated me as a child show people I have never met in real life. Handwritten scribbles on the back reveal their identity. These images link me to the past, my roots, even if I only have my parents’ testimony to confirm this. There is something very haunting about old family photographs. I love the stories they imply. Somehow the stories are mine, because they are part of my family history, and I would not exist without these people. I have part of their DNA in me.
Perhaps I find these photographs haunting because so many of these people died so long ago – but somehow they remain present in the images, captured and immortalized, staring from the past into the present. The photograph holds a secret, and I hope that staring at it hard enough will reveal it.
A lot of the work I do is based on family snapshots, and it is often about narrating life and how our identity is partly shaped by images. When I was little, my father often photographed me. He let me try his SLR too. I got my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 77x, when I was 9. I think picking up that camera was my way of coming into existence, creating my own story, as well a continuing the one already being told.
I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I wanted to see what I looked like from the point of view of others. I soon discovered that the camera’s point of view could be manipulated, and could help me represent the ideal me. It helped me see myself as beautiful. About the same time I also realized I did not like other people to photograph me anymore. I felt vulnerable in front of the camera, and preferred having control of it.
As I have grown older, I have continued to experiment with representing myself, recording physical and mental changes I have gone through. When I was pregnant I photographed myself and my growing belly every few weeks, and uploaded many of the images to my Flickr stream. I feel shy about putting myself out there, in cyberspace, but I also wanted to share the images. It is a game of hide and seek, playing with the boundaries of what can be shown.
The face of my grandmother, shot by Man Ray, blended with her curtains. I’m pregnant and wearing her night dress.
People take photos to remember. Something to look at and show, when they want to revisit the past, the time they were pregnant, the time their child was a baby, the first school day.
People take photos to remember. And to share. People imagine that what is in the image has some level of truth to it. They may even feel the images are more true than their memory. If a photo of them is attractive, they feel more attractive. If a photo makes them look fat, they think they must be fatter than they realized. If a photo shows them smiling during a rainy vacation, they think, after all, it was a good vacation.
The reality of images, is more real to us, than our memories. We trust the photos more. As we move away from past reality, images take over that reality and become more real. We base so much of our evaluation of reality on the images we see. It is how we learned how a horse moves when it gallops. It is how we discovered what facial expressions are really like. Sometimes, for some of us, it is easier to understand the reality of a moment, when we step away from it a little bit, by putting a camera between it and us. It becomes neatly organized within a frame. We gain some level of control over it.
When my grandmother became senile and lost much of her memory, she started tearing photos up. My mother discovered a wastebasket full of torn up photographs, some dating back to the 40s, some from more recent years, most of them portraits of family members, some old friends too. All these torn up pieces were mixed together, black and white and colour, all mixed up in the wastebasket. Mixed up and lost, like her memory.
Tearing up photographs is almost sacrilege. Imagine piercing the eyes of your mother in a photograph. Its just a piece of paper. Or is it a piece of her? You keep the photos of loved ones close to you. If they hurt you, you can take it out on the photo. It is an frightening act of destruction. The photograph represent the person. Thus it is apparent that my grandmother must have felt hateful and resentful towards all these faces staring at her from the old photos. She must have known they were related to her somehow – but she didn’t remember! The photos had lost their meaning, because they had lost their anchoring in reality, their grounding in her memory. Memory is also our grounding in reality. It is our horizon of experience and our understanding of our own bodies, which gives us our ability to interpret the world around us.
Photographs have a life of their own. When we look back at old photos, we may discover something new, based on things we have come to learn. We may realize a photo of our parents was taken when they were in fact breaking apart, and we may suddenly see some hint of sadness in the corner of an eye. Photos tell stories. Stories that only matter if we feel some connection to them, if we recognize something, if they make us think.
Never did get round to posting the result of the flesh machine project from last year.. But here it is!
The idea behind the film was to show the connection between the mind/brain/thinking and the body/flesh/senses, the way we experience the world, feel and think.
I did my first photo shoot with Danish musician Marie Fjeldsted back in 2009, and another one in 2010, for the cover of her first EP, Thieves Like Us, which has been getting very good reviews. It’s not officially released until April 4th 2011.
Marie Fjeldsted told me that she often felt inspired while walking or bicycling around Copenhagen, so I thought it would be nice to shoot a video reflecting this, something which was on the move and in a format that changed, so it might be viewed oriented both landscape and portrait.
The video was shot on a mobile and is meant for viewing on a mobile device too. I have to admit, the technique might not be there completely, as most mobile phones will not let you tilt the video, but still – it was a nice experiment I think.
You can check out the result here:
A couple of years ago I participated a video collaboration between artists from all over the world, inspired by the Surrealist creation method, The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP). The best thing about it was the people I connected with. One of them was the talented Swedish artist Anders Weberg, who works with video, sound, new media and installations, primarily concerned with identity. In the beginning of 2011 Anders invited artists to interpret “Expose Yourself” in front of a mobile phone camera and send it to him. 18 people from 11 different countries answered him. I was one of them. My video was shot in front of a mirror, using a flash light and a mobile phone. Anders re-interpreted all the interpretations and added himself to the mixture. The result is very nice, I think. Check it out…
Artists: ANTTI SAVELA, AREA ERINA LÓPEZ PINO, BO G SVENSSON, CLINT ENNS, OSVALDO CIBILS, WILLIAM ESDALE, THORE SONESON, WOLF D. SCHREIBER, SHEER ZED, ALEX BUHL, CORINNE DE SAINT ANGEL, JOSE VIEIRA, EVA GRIP, NICLAS HALLBERG, ALISON WILLIAMS, STAFFAN LAGER, MOTOKO ISHII AND SHARON SEKHON.Science as corrupter, deceptive servant and seducer (and as the alien or ‘other’) is possibly the explanation for the odd connection between the machine and the erotic there seems to be in modern and contemporary culture.
In 1927, the dangerous, seductive robot Maria from Fritz Langs Metropolis..:
From the late 1960s HR Geigers weirdly erotic bio-technical surrealist style images..:
In 1986s Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri started his comic series Morbus Gravis which takes place in a weird futuristic world where machine and flesh is merging, and possibly everything happens inside the mind of the creator – God? A living computer? The brain in the jar?? I’m honestly not sure, as it starts out one way, but becomes more and more complicated.
It’s a twisted, sick universe, where a virus is turning everyone into monsters, machine and flesh has merged and the female lead is able to survive mainly by having sex with everyone. However, she remains the only really pure, sane being. There’s a link to a text about Ecofeminist themes in the story here.
In the 1990s Chris Cunningham went from designing special effects and drawing Judge Dredd comics to making music- and artvideos. Famously his Björk video features two pure, minimalist type robots (Björk clones) making love, in contrast to the more recent Rubber Johnny short:
Researching this, I also stumbled across Norweigan Christopher Conte, who makes biomechanical sculptures:
City of Lost Children (1997) by Jeunet and Caro:
The Borg Queen from Star Trek movie First Contact (1996):
“The Borg were a pseudo-race of cybernetic beings, or cyborgs, from the Delta Quadrant. No truly single individual existed within the Borg Collective (with the possible sole exception of the Borg Queen), as they were linked into a hive mind. Their ultimate goal was perfection through the forcible assimilation of diverse sentient species, technologies, and knowledge. As a result, they were among the most dangerous and feared races in the galaxy.” From http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Borg
I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I was exploring identity through image making.
I doubt I would have decided to follow a creative career, had it not been for a course on “sex and sexuality in contemporary art” I took while at uni – and more importantly the support of Rune Gade, who was teaching the course. Until I met Rune, I had kept my self-portraits more or less secret.
In June 2008, when I had just joined artreview.com, critic Laura McLean-Ferris wrote a bit about my work in relation to anonymity in Roundup #10:
“…interestingly, much of the work explores portraiture as a representational trap, and many of her images of women in particular are fragmentary images of body parts, such as legs and stomachs.
The figures here seem caught in a bind, unable to represent themselves through image-making. The viewer, the photographer and the subject are all part of a process of refusal and small resistance.”
I like this in relation to the self portraits, since to some extend the viewer, photographer and the subject are one and the same, and still there is the same process of resistance going on.
I think the self-portrait genre is considered a little embarrassing and improper, there is a certain vulnerability about it, putting yourself out there at the risk of everybody regarding you as a narcissistic exhibitionist. However ourselves and our mortal coil ought to be one of the subjects we know best. I think it is a question of daring to be honest.
The self-portrait above was shortlisted for the BJP International Photography Award, single image category & exhibited at Vision 09.
When I was pregnant I photographed myself and my growing belly every few weeks. The images were uploaded to my Flickr diary. We jokingly called the resulting series The Architecture of Art, making the connection between two different kinds of creation; the construction of a child (Arthur, my son) and the much less wondrous making of an image.
I find the human shape and the changes it goes through very fascinating, after all our minds are bound to it, as is our feelings. If you think about it, that is really very hard to relate to or comprehend. When I photograph I think I’m trying to capture a glimpse of what goes on behind the skin, the combination of feeling and flesh, or somehow translate the bodily experience.
When I left high school I thought maybe I wanted to be a movie director.. so I went to London and found work as a runner for a production company, Activate Productions, which mainly did music videos. Since then (this was 1995) it has become much easier to make videos in the comfort of your own home, and I still like to play around with it once in a while. On ArtReview I met some people who were doing a project that sounded like fun…
The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP) is a unique video collaboration of 36 artists from 16 countries, inspired by the Surrealist invention, the “Exquisite Corpse”. The project is coordinated by the Brazilian video-artist Kika Nicolela.
Using the semi-blind, sequential method of the surrealists’ game, ECVP participants create video art in response to the final ten seconds of the previous member’s work. Each member is asked to incorporate these seconds into their piece, creating transitions as they please, until everyone’s vision is threaded together into an instigating final “corpse.”
ECVP Screenings and exhibitions have been taking place in various countries since June, such as Sweeden, USA, Greece, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Africa. A book about the project will be released in the first semester of 2009.
An interview with some of the project members can be read here.
See if you can spot my one minute here:
more about "CORPSE#9 on Vimeo", posted with vodpod
The Vitruvian Woman is a multimedia sculpture created by 34 artists from around the world. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch; The Vitruvian Man, which idealises the classic proportions of the human body, in his case the male body, The Vitruvian Woman sets out to trace the multidimensionality of womanhood in a flow of five three-minute video sequences reflecting the nine bodily regions: the head, heart, stomach, sexual organ, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg and feet.
Exhibitions:
2009 | December 14 – 23 | Video Installation at Video Dia Loghi 2009, Video festival, Torino, Italy
2009 | March 14 – April 19 | Debut Screening at Formverk Art Space, Eskilstuna, Sweden
My piece from the Vitruvian:
& here’s a couple from college:
more about "Flickr Video Embed: follow me", posted with vodpod
“The toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of conviction.”
Baudelaire The Philosophy of Toys
Aside from being interested in history, storytelling and culture, I’m also very interested in the way children experience the world; everything is new, so everything is potentially interesting and odd. I have tried to rediscover this way of seeing. The starting point was using the toy as a sort of time machine, hoping it would transport me back to a more original mindset.
I used to have a very sentimental longing for something lost, a childhood innocence probably, dating back to some preschool age that I don’t remember. At university I read Baudelaires essay The Philosophy of Toys with great interest for that same reason.
Toys are for investigating, learning, and understanding in a non-verbal way. And they are objects we tend to grow very attached to, even if our consumer society has taught us to always want something new, and to toss things away as soon as they’ve lost their mystery.
“All Children talk to their toys; the toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the camera obscura of their little brains.”
Baudelaire begins his essay with a story from his childhood: a wealthy lady shows him a special room filled with toys – her children’s treasury – and lets him choose a toy to remember her by. First of all, the toy has sentimental value, it reminds of us of people, places, a time long gone, the wonderland of childhood, like fragments of the fleeting modern culture.
“For any modernity to be worthy of one day taking its place as antiquity, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be destilled from it.”
From The Painter of Modern Life. Beauty or the divine was what art was to aspire to; a beauty, part of which was eternal, the soul of art – and part of which was relative and decided by the surroundings – the age, the fashion, the moral, the feelings – this was the body of art.
Toys are a miniature version of life, more colourful and ideal than reality. In the toyshop you’ll find our entire culture and the dreams it’s built upon. Baudelaire also talks about the child’s need to dominate or control their toys, to tear them apart and find their essence, the soul, as Baudelaire calls it. This is also the beginning of melancholy – the discovery of the void – since the magic of the toy vanishes once it’s destroyed.
