DARKER#2, coming soon....the next number of Darker will be collaboration with street photographer Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen and writer Eva Løveid Mølster. We are planning to make a de luxe edition box with 2-signed photos + the Darker magazine.
VISUAL NOTATIONS
Eva Løveid Mølster
Images moves with the ever-changing presence of being in public places. We can almost hear the loud sounds of the tram cutting its way trough the town square, and we nearly get a tickling feeling from the fur collar on the man right in front of us on the train. People live their lives and do what they do; they even sleep, right in front of us or next to each other, as if it was the most normal thing to do.
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| photo: Erik Worsøe Eriksen |
But what does it mean to fall asleep in public places? When you sleep, you close your eyelids and literally shut the world out. Normally this is something you would do at home, in an already safe context. And sleeping is something we usually do in calm, slightly chilly and dark places. Public places are the opposite of calm; they are filled with walking and talking, coughing and eating, communication and transportation. And even at the quieter and less populated times, there is still a silent noise from the different visual elements from advertisement, graffiti or municipal maintenance. Sleeping in public places implies the ability to evoke the absence of always-present noisiness. It implies a whole new concept of darkness.
SEE
The term “to take a picture” links photography to both the fixing of time and the creating of an image. Taking can be the same as stealing and even grasping something, which in both cases focuses on something to be taken. Here, the action of taking and what to take is up to the artist to decide.
When the photographer walks around with compact and lightweight cameras, images are being created along the way. The analogue or digital wonders work perfectly as notebooks. By regularly noting down visual impressions, the images ends up as parts of a story, like an imaginary movement build up by a variety of fixations of time.
Once the picture is taken, it has become an image, a consciously created optical counterpart of something. And when the image is presented in a context, qua art, it also comes with a series of challenges; what do you see, what do you feel, and what do you reflect on? A series of images starts with a blurry self-portrait with cigar and moves over to six apparently similar images, different enough to trigger an instant movie feeling. This happens again, several times, with the back of a plaid jacked, with the silhouettes of naked trees, or even with the almost abstract images through semi-reflecting window glass. This way, the series of images makes the eye dwell, longer than usual, on certain parts or aspects of each image. It also opens up for questions on photography’s relation to reality and to the photograph’s ability to capture time.
DWELL
One way to experience art is to look for the stories told by the artist. The statues of the Ancient Greek, the triptychs of the Middle Ages, the portraits of the Renaissance or the photos of the Russian Constructivism, they all communicate some kind of story of the world as it is or as it should be. But where do we look for these potential stories? In the work itself, in the thoughts behind, or maybe even in the combination of work and creation?
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| photo: Yngvar Larsen |
Two-dimensional art, whether it is painting or photography, can be formalistic or nonformalistic, it can be expressionistic, impressionistic, abstract or surrealistic, and it can be with or without depth. And the technique is crucial. It has been argued that the photograph has the ability to record “a feeling for life” (Alfred Stieglitz). Seen this way, the camera makes incisions in time and space, and leaves us with bits and pieces of reality.
Modernism made artists demonstrate what they found essential with their specific art form. The paintings became flatter, the sculptures more three-dimensional, music became only sound, and theatre became more staged art. Uncountable kinds of isms were created, and today we try our best to understand what actually happened.
But in the beginning, photography was considered only as a tool for painters, to help freeze a movement or make time stop. While working its way into the world of fine art, photography has kept the documentary aspect, the capturing of here-and-now and the relation to a specific, measurable place in time and space. And this combination of visual creation and a nearly scientific link to reality could be what make art photography so complex and boundless.
Things have changed, though, since the early days of modernism. Today artists can choose between analogue and digital photography, we are miles away from Stieglitz’ straight and untouched photography, and yet, we still believe in the photograph. We believe that the photograph tells us something about the world as it is. And at the same time, we believe that we freely can choose what to see, what to think, and what to feel.
REFLECT
The imagery of Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen and Yngvar Larsen in Darker #2 can be seen as visual notations, a way to write down thoughts and ideas along the way. They both use the digital camera, taking pictures sometimes without a plan, even keeping them when they look almost the same. This leaves the artists with a flow of images, movements put together by reality and time.
Given the essential significance of the action or thought behind the work, we could say that they act with their images by sharing them with us. Instead of using their voices or their pens, they talk through their lenses. Darker #2 turns out to be a dialogue between the two artists. The images also work as parts of a whole, like every section in a text is a way to create a wholeness of thoughts. Photography is the technique of the artists, but it has also become their object of reflection.
I sense two different ways of using the connection between a single image and the whole. Larsen mixes images from there-and-then, bringing them close to the viewer’s here-and-now, by a carefully edited formal abstraction. While Eriksen creates visual impressions. He lets one image try the other out. One plus one becomes more than two, and at the same time the uniqueness of each image is left untouched.
The context in Darker #2 is imagery, technique and storytelling. Put together the visual notations tell different and at the same time coincide stories. The stories invite us to remember that shapes, images and potential material for artistic creation always surround us. By picking it up, taking the picture, and showing it to us, the artist opens up our world, our way of living, to be reflected on. But at the same time we are required to make an effort to perceive and experience the whole story in our own, personal way.
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DARKER#1
