All spreads are from Objektiv #15, ALBUM by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen. — All spreads are from *Objektiv #15, ALBUM* by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen.

NEW NARRATIVES
For more than ten years, artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen have worked on their joint fanzine project parallel with their separate work. Containing mass-produced images taken from various prints and magazines, the photocopied fanzine is, according to the artists, a project without end. Photography book editor and eager ALBUM collector Gösta Flemming met up with Mugaas and Storsveen in Oslo in March (2017), curious to hear how it all started.

Gösta Flemming Putting together images in book form is a genre of its own. People pick up tons of amateur photographs from fleamarkets, and we’re also seeing more and more publications containing images found on the internet, often with unknown sources. Your focus is on commercial images. How did this project start, and for what reasons?

ALBUM We’ve been publishing ALBUM for about ten years, but it started long before that. We’ve known each other for about 40 years, and we created ALBUM #1 after 30 years of continuous conversation and friendship, so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it started.

GF There’s a true symbiosis between you?

AL ALBUM places our dialogue outside of our private conversation to include others. We consider that dialogue to be interesting, but because it can be inaccessible to others, the ALBUM project is a way to edit and visualise what we talk about. For the past years, the art scene has focused on philosophical references, the language has got very complicated and intricate. ALBUM was a proposal to go back confidently to the visual material and through that bring forward strong statements. We decided very early on that it would be restricted to images solely, no words. The first edition set a standard that every subsequent edition would follow. It was decided that the zine would be colour printed, on folded A3 sheets limited to 200 Xeroxed issues. The layout is done with scissors, tape and paper; the size dictates how many pages can be stapled together at once. This is the core of the project, though we’ve done other ALBUM-related things, such as installations and posters. The archive materials/sources are inexhaustible.

GF Where do you get all these images?

AL Everywhere, really, though the majority of the prints come from fleamarkets. We could’ve made hundreds of ALBUM issues. The inexhaustibility of themes we find in the material is surprising to us. It’s like they create themselves, and the material is always accessible. Ten years ago, there was so much freedom in making something as quickly as the fanzine for- mat allows, so we set some very strict parameters. We borrow Xerox machines, Xeroxing at night, during which process a simplification takes place. The added restrictions became pivotal, giving us the opportunity to go in many different directions, but with precision.

GF The imagery is from the 1960s–80s, yes?

AL Mainly, though every ALBUM features new and even older images. We had a lot of material even before we started actualising the project, and we continue collecting images. Visiting the bookstands at various fleamarkets, we find very few books we don’t already own. We mostly collect publications on education like sexual education, books on dog training, cooking, travel, crafting, leisure and cultural history. Starting out, we used clippings from our own art practice, but we found that within the context of the project the less interesting or less complicated images work better in creating a new dialogue. The most spectacular and personal favorites are usually edited out during the process, though they do act as important kick-starters.

GF It got me thinking of Jan Stenmark. He’s very focused on the 60s and 70s in his works.

AL Yes, he’s very time-specific, though he works concretely, juxtaposing text and image, which is different from what we do, but there are similarities. Like him, we’ve also been working with the images we grew up with. We both study the juxtaposing of different elements. It’s exciting to show how little is needed before one image influences another, creating a new narrative. It’s like a collage really.

GF Are you familiar with Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel from 1955? It contains newspaper images with notes that he collected from the Second World War while he was in exile from Germany. He was very suspicious about photography as a truth witness, and in Kriegsfibel he combines these images with short poetry attempting to decode and understand them. Then in 2011 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin added media images of the war on terror from the internet to Brecht’s book, resulting in the publication War Primer 2. It’s also a form of collage. How do you work? Do you cut out the images you like?

AL There are so many images packed in boxes at both our studios, plus we have a lot of books to choose from. For example, ABC for sexual education and Sex Lex. Here, every theme is treated equally: under H you’ll find Harem, Handicap, Herpes and Hormones, all at the same level. We start with lots of images spread out on white sheets on the floor, outlining the pages and the sequencing. This makes it easier to see connections and to choose which narratives we want to proceed with. Some issues have a strong visual connection that’s difficult to explain, while others have a clear thematic connection. We build the visual narrative around a well-used structure: introduction, elaboration, a sort of climax near the end before phasing out. It’s always exciting when the issue works as one readable idea despite the fragmented imagery.

GF What about copyright? Have you been approached by anyone?

AL No, not yet anyway; we don’t really worry about it, but we steer away from imagery that has been defined as art, artist’s publications or magazines or books on art. We use mass-produced images only. The best images for us are those with an accessible, simple message; those are the easiest to manipulate. By using already printed images, we make it clear where the images are from, leaving no question as to whether these are our images or not. Part of the joy of the project is to recognise the images’ original reading and at the same time to see them in a new relationship. Before the book was published [The first ten issues were collected as a book by Teknisk Forlag and Primary Information in 2014], ALBUM was a Xerox machine project. Copyright wasn’t really an issue with the book either, basically because there wouldn’t be any money if we were sued.

GF Richard Prince is doing a similar thing, appropriating images from various sources.

AL Richard Prince is exploring questions around individual desire in the encounter with commercial interests. He doesn’t take a clear position on whether this is good or bad. However, this has become a problem now that he’s no longer a small-scale artist appropriating images from Malboro campaigns, but a world-famous one appropriating at the same speed and scale from less know photographers or personal Instagram accounts. There’s the issue of privacy: are open Instagram accounts public or private? Right or wrong, there’s more to it than that. All of a sudden, he’s on the opposite side of the power relation, which is interesting when speaking of appropriation. Who you are can’t be insignificant in this regard; he’s traversed from one to the other. It should be a priority in life to protect the lesser.

GF You also have an established position after 10 years.

AL Yes, it’s a challenge placing oneself on a bigger scale, but for now, we’re a far cry from Prince. We borrow images in our own artistic oeuvre as well. Appropriation is a well-established art practice, so we don’t need to try to justify it. Even though not all is allowed, it kind of almost is.

GF When is it an artwork? When is it that the actual artistic contribution begins? Even if you use other peoples pictures, it’s in the context of your own artwork.

AL The images in ALBUM are not the actual artwork; it’s what we do with them and the narrative that follows from it.

GF This is what I meant when I said that this was an established genre: there’s a tradition you’re working with. Pioneering this field was artist Hans Peter Feldmann, who for decades collected and assembled others’ images in book form.

AL Feldmann is not as preoccupied as other artists in the West with the symbiosis between individuals and capitalism. He plays with all sorts of visual expressions. Whereas Prince is sexy and dangerous, Feldmann is communicative and playful, like a kid in a candy store. ALBUM is probably a child of both, together with Fischli and Weiss. These are artists we’ve looked to for inspiration.

GF It’s interesting to see the different characters that this kind of work can assume. Yours is joyous, Feldmann’s is that of the manic collector. Tacita Dean’s book Flow has a whole other expression: she uses amateur photography in a quieter way.

AL An argument for both Prince and Feldmann is that they voice a different perspective from the traditionally commercial one. It’s important that these voices that challenge how we handle visual information exist. It enables us to better scrutinise the information.

GF Warhol was at the forefront of recycling images in his silkscreens, where he added new features such as colours.

AL He wanted to remove the notion of a personal touch: a classic artistic stand. This notion goes even further back, to the likes of Max Ernst, who used kiosk literature and commercials for his collages. We choose our images with our artistic skills, picking out the ones through which we want to tell our narrative. It’s often hard to know whether a photo is art or not, but our work is about opening up a space where one isn’t told how or what to look for; instead, one’s invited to apply one’s own reading and voice.

GF Is ALBUM a meeting point in your practices?

AL Yes, that’s a fitting description. We started with a wish to showcase weird photos, putting them in contexts that made us laugh. Quite quickly, it became a conscious, critical reading of our culture’s visual material and so we wanted to question through them how we viewed the world. Working on ALBUM #3, for example, we became aware that a large portion of the images we chose depicted a lone man in a landscape. The focus wasn’t that he was a man, but a representation of a human being. Women are seldom represented like this.

GF She’s more of an object?

AL Yes, definitely. We found lots of images of man and nature or man and the big machine. He’s heroically alone, he looks content, he’s got purpose. in being there. We changed the narrative, proposing that he was melancholic and yearning. It’s important to point out that this theme was something that was already there in the material; we have no particular interest in lonely men, as such. By defining him as lonely and yearning for love and purpose, we wanted to return him to a state of individuality, at the same time underscoring who gets to speak on behalf of humanity: by and large, white men. Non-white people have even less of a voice than white women. There’s been a great change for the better, but it takes time, especially when it’s so little communicated in white culture. After #3 we made an issue on women, focusing on representation. All our fanzines attempt to find new readings of our own gender.

GF You’re far away from the moralising attitude in the childrens’ books that you’ve used images from. There’s a lot of humor in your work, even when it’s serious. No one is exempt.

AL That’s not contradictory. Exposing ourselves is important, as with ALBUM #4 on female representation. On one page, there’s a typical fashion image from Vogue, a totally unrealistic ideal. On the opposite page is an image from your typical softcore porn magazine, mocking a woman for being incapable of sharpening a knife. The result is that these women, in this new context, become both independent individuals and hardcore feminists. Therein lies our freedom. We know the references and give them new meaning and at the same time the original context remains accessible for many. We look for images with rare narratives, like the active or strong woman, the objectified or caregiving man, people of different ethnicity not exoticised, wanting to show each of them as modern, equal human beings.

GF Your work is very equal, no matter what the cultural origins of its subjects.

AL It’s important that everyone gets to be an individual. In the issue on women artists, we mostly poke fun at ourselves about how convenient it is to have the creative woman around. It’s amazing how many fashion spreads out there feature scenes from within the studio showing women in expensive dresses throwing paint at each other. And weirdly, there are a lot of women washing their shoulders. We’ve obviously got very dirty shoulders! It’s both extremely funny and unrealistic at the same time.

GF How was this issue received?

AL Well, in many ways it’s a very obvious project and agenda. Our standpoints are easily readable, even if it’s just images and no text.

GF One of the images recalls Jeanne d’Arc; we carry all these references with us.

AL Exactly, all of us carry with us different histories that shape us whether it’s newspaper history, film history, women’s history. We’ve seen millions of images, and a lot of these we can read without an attached explanation. Our colleagues understood our project straightaway, while everyone else was looking for a text, a title or an introduction. But with more issues, they stopped asking.

GF Sure, it’s so dense, the connections become clear. How many issues will there be?

AL We haven’t got any restrictions; we’re hoping it will be a life-long project. Not only is the material inexhaustible, but so is the format. We’ve found our storytelling method, where we can come up with new themes and photos, and we hope it will go on for many years to come. ALBUM is our fuel for our separate practices. But it’s essential that it continues to feel relevant and fun to create.