Side by Side

In my possession there is an old carte-de-visite that I often return to. It is a studio portrait of two young women, my mother's grandmother and her best friend. They look serious, sitting very tightly together, dressed in their finest frocks and with their gazes firmly attached to the camera. The now over one hundred-year-old black and white friendship picture has always reminded me of two of my own friends. In the older photo I see my friends' special affinity mirrored. In their faces my friends ́ ditto. So similar in appearance and - I imagine – ways.

In an effort to understand this fascination, I photographed my two friends a while ago, in the same poses and looks as on the carte-de-visite. Side by side I then compared these four women with a century between them, in a hopeless desire to find an answer. But to understand and capture what is at the same time past is an absurdity and the essence of photography itself.

Jenny Lindhe, artist and curator. Head of Photographs Collection, Landskrona Foto. Founder of gallery Breadfield.

In our very first issues, we invited different people to write about an image they found memorable, under the headline ’Sinnbilde’, a column inspired by FOAM Magazine. Now, in Objektiv’s 10th year, as the ocean of images continues to swell, we’re reigniting this column online.