CLIFFORD PRINCE KING

Clifford Prince King, Poster Boys, 2000.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

This. Lying on a mattress, kissing. The poster on the wall trying to hold on. The uncertain installation, the importance of inclusion. There is so much in it. The statement of having the person portrayed on the wall. How this couple may or may not have discussed politics before they just had to lie down to get closer. At the top of the poster, a drawing. The face of a person looking down on them. The grapes in the corner, envious like me.

My friend sent it. It's from a show she's working on with another curator. They use the line: ‘Don't we touch each other just to prove we are still here?’ in the title. It is from a poem by Ocean Vuong.

The photographer has said in an interview that he gets inspiration from people-watching, stating: ‘It’s almost like seeing something precious happening, and as a photographer, you want to capture it, but usually, it passes by too quickly, so I try to recreate those kinds of moments but make them Black and queer.’

I remember a student I did a portfolio review with, she'd made a book on what love was and said it was because she didn't know. She was 23 and had never been in love. The book was full of pictures of couples cut out of advertisements. She couldn't find any real people in love. I know this by King is staged, but it is still truer than an ad. She should see this image.

From the upcoming exhibition at Princeton University Art Museum: ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?’ Photography and Touch.’ Curated by Susannah Baker-Smith and Susan Bright.

WALKER EVANS

Afterimage by Bjarne Bare:

While the documentary image is haunted by the decisive moment, the studium calls for a more refined and contemplating dialogue. An unfinished message that seeks context in order to be read. Walker Evans seems to hold a special photographic gaze. Jean-Paul Sartre describes a person entering a bar and gazing through the locale, but as soon as the eye catches another eye, the gaze disappears, the magic is broken. ‘I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears.’ In such, I find Evans photographic work function as a pensive gaze more than a straight photographic document. Or as Lacan puts it: ‘In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it — that is what we call the gaze.’

When documenting Floyd Burroughs’ family and home for Let us Now Praise Famous Men in 1936, Evans’ isolated focus on the objects caught my eye. A chair flanked by a white sheet and a broom. An empty bed. A pair of workers shoes. Utensils. Along with the portraits he made, the closeups of details describe the life and situation more than the actual faces. As if, in the portraits, the gaze is broken. Along with the use of his gaze, Evans also distances himself from the traditional mode of documentary practice. There is little or no action in his photographs, yet we do experience the situation, through the focus on details. The images are silent, and their immanent communication is key. They are studies. In this, a photographic language develops, one which is more formal, perhaps, but also stays away from the usual photographic realism, where motion, portraiture and action is the modus operandi. When focusing on objects, such as the boots in the negative space, the empty bed, or the chair flanked by the broom and sheet, Evans lets the image breathe, look at you, rather than having the person in the image speaking. It is as if Evans trusts the image, the photography and its silence.

Walker Evans, Dora Mae Tengle, sharecropper's daughter, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.

While writing this, I remembered seeing an image of Evans included in an exhibition at Standard (Oslo) in 2013. The exhibition included mainly contemporary work, and I was puzzled by the inclusion of the Evans piece. I am now, perhaps, understanding this better, as if it was an ode to Evans’ mind and eye. It is hard for me to define the postmodern project in photography, although it carries importance. I find the time we are in, photographically, somewhere in between modernity and postmodernity – and thus work created today should be informed by both. If a documentary approach still can be relevant, or at least exist, the straight photographic document is no longer enough – as if its naiveté is broken. Narration is no longer key. The images look back at us, and we are better informed in reading them now than ever before. In looking at Evans’ work dating nearly 80 years back, I have found relevant use and understanding of the photographic image. In Dora Mae Tengle, sharecropper's daughter, Evans’ Friedlander-esque approach reveals something to me. Not only does he include himself in the image (there is a similar approach among his images of flood victims), but he also destructs the gaze, creating a similar effect as to the more recent Gazing Balls by Jeff Koons. The neutrality of the image is broken, the image looks back, and the photographer is present. This – what seems to be a simple snapshot – holds so many layers of photographic understanding. Along the other work by Evans’ it makes him a highly relevant photographer in the quest of understanding the potential for the straight image in a contemporary discourse.

TONY HANCOCK

Afterimage by Clare Strand & Gordon McDonald:

This is a film still from the Tony Hancock movie The Rebel. A film about the accidents that lead to success in an art career and of ambition winning out to talent before once again giving way. It is a film about the ‘value’ of art, about patronage, about marketing art and about art’s frustrations as a vocation and career. 

This comedy, for those who are not familiar with it, charts the journey of a bored junior businessman from London who daydreams of the bohemian lifestyle of the Parisian art scene of the late 1950s and early 60s. He chisels at concrete blocks in his small boarding house room to create his giant vision of Aphrodite at the Waterhole, and paints naïve canvases of birds in flight or a disembodied foot – all whilst wearing his artist’s uniform of a smock and beret. Eventually, he loses patience with the life he is born to and flees to Paris, where he accidentally gains success with his flatmate’s paintings and becomes the toast of the city. His ego becomes bloated and enjoys everything that this fame brings – including the credibility he craves, money and the adorations of the rich and influential. He is, despite this, a man in an alien world and ill-prepared for the part he must play. He is eventually found out as a sham – not one of the people who is born to this world of privilege and culture, but an intruder.

It was in 1992 on our first day at art school, in a college-wide screening of this film that we first met and talked. Strand handed a Softmint sweet to MacDonald and MacDonald broke a tooth on it. The message of the film and the trauma of Strand’s kind gesture left a big mark on us, and the discussion about what is art and what is not has been our constant preoccupation as MacDonaldStrand ever since. Our understanding of our position as intruders in a world we were neither born in to has also been constantly informed by this film. 

TAYSIR BATNIJI

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

There is a face, I can see the eyes. The green and fragmented screenshot is divided into five. At the top I see a light switch. Then there is a green stripe covering the top of the face. Then I see the eyes looking back at me, before another green stripe. The bottom of the photograph shows the shoulders of the person the photographer is talking to. It looks like a woman in a halter top; it could be summer. Taysir Batniji’s book Disruptions shows screenshots of video calls with his loved ones in Gaza, taken between 2015 and 2017.

The light switch has such a prominent role in this picture. We never really see or notice it in real life. We just touch it, absentmindedly. I wonder if it is still there, if the house where this person lived is still there. In other pictures in the book there are streets, houses, more people, more life. There is probably nothing left. The word 'noise' is used in the press release about the images. It is true: they are noisy. Even more so – in some ways – than the images of Gaza shared daily on social media. We do what we can. We share. We watch it live. We cry with the parents holding the impossibly small white body bags.

At dinner last night a friend said that nothing can be saved at this point. We watched the reel of the doctor risking her life, running across a road to help a man who's been hit by a car. Another of a mother and child in the street. The mother is still. Hit by a sniper. The child is alive, and so there is a rescue. The child is carried to a doctor who runs with him to a hospital. We all know that the child isn’t safe, not even there, since the hospital might be hit next. There are no rules anymore. The Israeli politicians just carry on. I think of my friend from Tel Aviv who posts about the Israeli hostages. I think about them too, but this was never about what happened that October day.

The blurriness of Batniji’s images from Gaza came to mind when I saw the work of Mame-Diarra Niang at the Cape Town Art Fair this weekend. A work from the series Morphologie du songe (Morphology of Dreams) was on display at the Stevenson’s stand. Something Niang said in an interview about the series echoes the distorted screenshots: ‘This series feels like the abstract idea I have of myself, the acceptance that forgetting is also a starting point and a fleeting, necessary memory.’  I struggle with the idea of how to go on after seeing what is happening in Palestine, but I find comfort in reading these words in a country once torn by violence that now seems to be on the right side of history.

From the dedication on the first page of Batniji's book, we learn that he lost his mother in 2017. Since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment in 2023, he has lost 52 further members of his family. Tell me, what do we do now? We continue protesting, watching, sharing these disrupted images that haunt us. As Taous R. Dahmani writes in her essay at the end of the book: ‘Photography’s (absurd) quest to “tell the truth” might actually lie in fables, not realism. The abstract value of the glitch establishes a new type of document: evidence of the instability that rules over the Palestinian people, and of the survival of images, despite it all.’

Taysir Batniji, Disruptions, 2024. With the essay On What Subsists and What Persists, in French, Arabic and English, by Taous R. Dahmani. Designed & Published by Loose Joints. All profits go to NGO Medical Aid Palestine.

BERENICE ABBOT

Berenice Abbott, Fifth Avenue, nos. 4,6,8, New York, 1936, printed 1982, Gelatin silver print. Gift of A&M Penn Photography Foundation by Arthur Stephen Penn and Paul Katz, 2007. The Clark Art Institute, 2007.

Afterimage by Arturo Soto:

This photograph by Berenice Abbott from her astonishing project Changing New York (1935–39) has been my desktop background for the past five years, as it reflects my interests in the urban landscape, biography, affect, paratexts, composition, and technique. As with other photographs I love, I secretly wish I’d made it, despite the temporal impossibility. I admire the picture’s power of suggestion: the stark tonal contrast between the occupied brownstone and its (boarded-up?) neighbours seems to be a commentary on social division and economic marginalization, or perhaps more symbolically, a parable for societal good and evil in and the proximity of these two poles. However, the caption that appears in the 1939 publication of the series complicates such a straightforward interpretation of the photograph: “Built in the mid-eighties for three Rhinelander daughters, the houses at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street present a rising curve of elegance. Henry J. Hardenbergh, architect of the old Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel Albert and the Third Avenue Car Barns, designed all three. No. 8 was once the home of the art collection which formed a part of the original Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

The history of the buildings does not reflect the social division that a cursory look might suggest. A related close-up, for instance, shows the grandeur of the marble masonry entrance of No. 8 obscured in this wide shot. We can only speculate on the meaning of the other details not mentioned in the caption: the truck’s company name, the broad and slender water hydrants standing next to a dwarf bus stop sign like the lineup of a comedy troupe, or the spatial connection between the tram tracks, the sewers, and the two cars that bookend this NOHO corner. The original caption by Elizabeth McCausland – recouped by Sarah M. Miller in her recent book Documentary in Dispute – stresses the element of economic privilege even further, stating that the corner brownstone was “the first marble house built in the city,” but also asserts that the moral values represented in the picture are more ambiguous than the bright contrast suggests. 

This image has been printed in slightly different ways, as it used to be more common in the past. The Museum of the City of New York, which houses part of the project’s archive, has nine prints of Fifth Avenue Houses, Nos. 4, 6, 8. One of these is a contact print made from the 8x10 inch negative with a distinct sepia tone and less contrast than the enlargements. As such, the potential for the buildings to serve as an analogy for prosperity and hardship gets diminished, a reminder that technique can also define meaning. It’s easy to get lost comparing the different versions of this image in American collections and the variety of their particularities. Some bear a Federal Art Project stamp on the verso; others feature Abbott’s signature and the recto; some are vintage prints, while others were printed as late as the 1980s in a much larger size (20x24 in) by the artist’s estate, etc. From what I can appreciate online, the print at The Clark (pictured here) seems to be the most tonally balanced, although the version in the book is even darker. 

I’m interested in how Abbot’s project is unsentimental but not neutral. She tried to convey a resentment for the loss of vernacular architecture and the ways of life that depended on those buildings. Her reputation and biography have become inseparable from the content of those pictures and the history of those sites (for instance, the building on Greenwich Village where Abbott and McCausland lived while making Changing New York is listed in the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project). As the historian Bonnie Yochelson reminds us, “it was her story as much as her photographs that captured the public’s imagination and made her an art-world celebrity.” This amalgamation of art and life has persisted over time, as publications and exhibitions consistently reference the anecdotal dimension of the work, which is now perceived to reflect the artist’s desires with great authenticity. For me, Abbott’s ingenious use of natural light in Fifth Avenue Houses, Nos. 4, 6, 8, and the abundance of details the scene offers articulates her sensitive perception of the urban landscape, resulting in a complex picture in which the elements you see, what they suggest, and what the artist intended them to communicate go in different yet strangely complementary directions. “Pictures”, wrote Abbott, “are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.” I’m grateful for her intricate motives, which produced a picture so full of life. 

SOPHIE CALLE

Sophie Calle, Voir la mer, 2011.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

I am thinking of the video work Voir la mer by Sophie Calle which I saw yesterday at the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Six videos of Istanbul residents seeing the sea for the first time in their lives. They are filmed from behind, looking at the sea. Then they turn around. One of them is very self-conscious in the beginning, looking into the camera.

During the ceasefire in Gaza, the Palestinians were told it was forbidden to go to the sea. Among all the atrocities, I still think about that. I can't see the reels of shaking children, I talked about it with a friend here in Paris who told me it was the same for her, but that she knew what was happening without seeing, that she had all the images of the war in her heart without having observed anything. I decided to lean on this faith and instead share other testimonies from the crisis. Like Chris Hedges’ speech about how we are failing the children of Gaza. He cries as he speaks.

I think about the way the Turkish people look into the camera. It reminds me of Kim Hiorthøy's exhibition Jeg er nesten alltid redd (I'm almost always afraid) at Fotogalleriet in 2003. Hiorthøy asked his friends to stand in front of a Super-8 camera for the duration of the roll of film. For three minutes you can look at these people and see all their thoughts, fears and self-consciousness seeping out of them. I think about the fear that we all carry within us.

I am going to a dinner tonight and there has been an email exchange about what to bring. A Frenchman replied that he would bring all his feelings. Me too.

SEIICHI FURUYA

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

One of the books in my suitcase after my stint at the Polycopies book fair during Paris Photo was Our Pocketkamera 1985 by Seiichi Furuya. After clearing out his attic, Furuya found films from a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera he had given to his wife Christine in 1978. She continued to take photographs until she took her own life in 1985. This book contains mainly pictures taken by Christine, Furuya and their son Komyo, together with texts written by Furuya.

The blurry image of the sliced pineapple on the cover and the portrait of Christine holding the pineapple and looking lovingly at her son, has been on my mind these days as I watch the horrific images of parents holding their murdered children in Palestine. Christine's struggle with mental illness is no secret throughout the book. There is also a striking juxtaposition of image and text that I’m still thinking about, she is standing on a balcony waving to the photographer, and we see many new flower pots on the balcony ledge. This is a still from a Super 8 that Furuya found in 2018. As he writes: ‘She started her life in East Berlin by inviting spring to her home, full of hope for a new beginning.’

Imagine how it must have felt for Furuya to find these films after such a long time. And even more, how it must have felt for their son. Seeing parts of his childhood through her eyes. I think about this when I make this year's album for my daughter, it takes three full working days, and yet there are pictures missing. I haven't figured out how to resurrect my iPhone 5, and I didn't get a chance to back up the last pictures before the phone died. I wonder what pictures are there, pictures of situations I have forgotten, not important to anyone but my daughter and me. In the picture with his mother, Komyo looks at the camera with a half-smile. His mother's arm around the chair he is sitting in, the pineapple ready to be devoured. It may seem like an unimportant, everyday picture, but pictures like these are desperately needed at this time.

LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR

One Image by Nina Strand:

What is it, a naked woman painted in silver print, dancing in the empty halls of Palais de Tokyo? The world is sinking and everyone says that nothing matters except what's happening in Gaza, and I couldn't agree more. And yet I go to exhibitions because art tends to make a difference, art might matter, at least I hope so.

I haven't read anything about in beforehand, and am met with a lot of hotel beds and screens above them with men talking, and videos of the artist dancing in the same hall that we're in. The exhibition is crowded, generations have come to see it. I sit on a bench and watch with a family of three generations. We all smile at each other and at the dancing artist. The grandfather moves a little on the bench so that his leg obscures the projection. He doesn’t notice and none of us mentions it. Somehow it fits that part of the screen has gone dark.

In SALUT, JE M'APPELLE LILI ET NOUS SOMMES PLUSIEURS, Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances, teaches, writes, speaks with friends. The wall text has a dent in it, someone stuck it to the wall and left it there. With the bump. Maybe it didn't matter in the grand scheme of world events. It works as a sign of these terrible times. I read in the text that Reynaud-Dewar wants to examine the function of the artist, and that this second part of the exhibition reads like a diary in which she wants to give an account of what happened inside and outside the Palais de Tokyo (in hotel rooms in Paris, in her emotional and professional relationships, in national and international current affairs).

I go a little further in, sit down on a bed and watch one of the men talking about what it is like to live as a gay man in Paris. I try to listen only to what he says, not read the English subtitles, and I think he stresses that he knows very well that he doesn't live in a utopia, nobody does he says. The elderly lady sitting next to the me says bravo and applauds spontaneously. I raise my hands too. We do not live in a utopia.

PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE

Afterimage by Marius Eriksen:

In an envelope from the Asker photo service - dated 18 November (the year is unknown) - found in his study, there were a few strips of positive film that Peter Wessel Zapffe, or his wife Berit, had delivered to re-order some prints. The first photo on the film was taken from the second floor of the house in Asker, depicting the sun setting over Nordre Follo. The next two photos are of the garden. In addition, Zapffe has photographed a class photo from when he graduated from high school in 1918, as well as a newspaper clipping from the time he climbed up into Tromsø Cathedral and proclaimed that he couldn't get any higher with the help of the church. The next time he uses his camera, it's winter. He points the camera at an overgrown, snow-covered garden.

There is a photographic-aesthetic approach to the issues that preoccupied Zapffe. And it is here that the centre of gravity of this book is to be found. His photographic archive is of almost staggering proportions, both qualitatively and aesthetically. I was struck by how Zapffe's pessimistic view of life seemed to crack precisely because of his photographic enthusiasm for magnificent landscapes, towering peaks, family, friends, animals and plants. It is ironic that Zapffe felt that nature's intrinsic value was independent of our participation, when he himself was so present in his subjects. After all, wouldn't the qualities of beautiful and magnificent nature disappear without our presence? Such anthropocentric thinking was far from Zapffe's mind. Perhaps he was not entirely consistent, but the principle was there: The magnificent and the beautiful will not disappear even if man disappears. An uninhabited planet was no accident, he argued.

This is from the book Et Stormkast Vækker Os av Dvalen (A gust of wind wakes us from our slumber) by artist Marius Eriksen. In the book, Eriksen engages in a photographic dialogue with the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990).

LINN PEDERSEN

Afterimage by David Allan Aasen:

NOTES TAKEN WHILE LOOKING AT LINN PEDERSEN’S Cul-de-sac

Linn Pedersen, Cul-de- sac, 2018 80 x 100cm, giclée print.

IT IS A QUIET and early summer morning here in the kitchen. Mari and the boys are still asleep, the girls watching the classic animated version of The Jungle Book in the living room. The sun has been up for a while already, a warm breeze coming through the open window, with the sound of birds. I drink my coffee by the table, watching the city landscape. Our view spans from Holmenkollen on the left-hand side to the city center and Nordstrand on the right, and I can just catch a glimpse of the fjord above the neighboring rooftop. Not long ago, most of this area was fields and forests. And I think about the fact that we live on top of an old volcano, along the Oslo rift, created some 200–300 million years ago. I imagine the landscape in front of me as pure nature, without the apartment buildings, houses, power lines, cars, and people. Not as the past, but as a future. Only the breeze, the sound of birds, insects, the clouds passing silently by. And then: a rattling in the bushes. A deer stepping out into a clearing, standing still as a statue, with upright neck, its ears rotating, scanning the area for predators.

*

I HAVE BEEN asked to write about an image that is on my mind, and I wonder whether I should go for a photograph by Sally Mann. Or perhaps one of Leonora Carrington’s paintings? There are several to choose from, images that appear from time to time that mean something to me in some way or other. Taking a sip from my cup, I realize I am staring at the work by Linn Pedersen, hanging on the wall beside me. And it strikes me: what about the kind of images that are always in our sight, constantly present, surrounding us in our own home? How do we see them? How do we relate to the few images we have chosen to put up on the wall? Do they become more noticeable? Or do they somehow disappear?

*

LOOKING AT Pedersen’s artwork, the opening line of Tor Ulven’s book of prose Stone and Mirror comes to mind: ‘The monument is a monument to its own oblivion.’

*

IN MAY 2018 Mari and I went to see Linn Pedersen’s exhibition Captain’s Cabin at MELK gallery in Oslo. I had been there a couple of days earlier and seen a work that caught my interest. Leaving the gallery, we agreed to purchase this photographic work, titled Cul-de-sac. We had recently moved into a new apartment, which still had an empty wall in the living room. We thought the photograph would fit that space perfectly. And it did. We kept the work there until the summer of 22. When building an extra wall to make separate rooms for the boys, we had to move it into the kitchen section.

*

WHEN A WORK OF ART is up on the wall, it seems there is no way back. There is a limited amount of money for purchasing art. There is a limited amount of space for placing the art. And there are limits to how often one can replace the art; it is not practical. One might move a table a little to the left or place the chair on the other side of the room, but better leave the art in peace; after all there is a hole in the concrete wall, or a nail in the plaster wall. And besides, the art does not wear out. We sometimes talk about replacing the stained and partly damaged sofa in our living room, but we always conclude that we should wait a couple more years, until the kids are done spilling milk, pizza, and chocolate on it. But how often do we talk about replacing the artwork.

*

DO WE TALK about the artwork at all?

*

GUESTS SOMETIMES COMMENT, saying they are nice pictures. But for us it seems as if the art has become part of the interior, like furniture. I suppose we reflect upon the images in our own way, consciously or not, not feeling the need to share our thoughts on them. It would be like commenting on the shape of a chair.

*

THE ARTWORK, taken out of its original context, is now a natural part the room, integral to the apartment. It seems one tries to make sure the image does not stand out too much. I am not sure that anyone expects the work to mean something to the people inhabiting the room, other than being nice to look at.

*

WE NOW SEE Cul-de-sac during every meal, when drawing with the kids and when reading scripts at night. We see it when we hang out our washing – the laundry rack always placed underneath. In pictures of the children in our family albums, the artwork is often captured in the background. In short, this work by Linn Pedersen has not only become part of the apartment, but it has also become a central part of our life – including, I guess, the subconsciousness of the entire family. I do not know how the children experience the art in our home, but in some way or other they will carry it with them, I am sure, just as I sometimes dream of the pictures that my parents had on the wall when I was a child.

*

THE ROOMS, the furniture, the books, the pictures, the art. A home, a shelter, a place to sleep and eat, to catch one’s breath. A gallery, a permanent exhibition, a place to think, to dream, to view the world from.

*

I LOVE THE COLORS of Cul-de-sac. And I like the shapes and forms, the bends spiraling downwards, bringing the whole image, basically calm and quiet, into motion, as if painted with large brush strokes from top to bottom. A photo taken in daylight, I guess, but presented in a kind of ghostly, dreamlike state: the inverted colors making the vegetation white, almost like frost, a background of ice holding the entire structure in place. From one point of view, it looks like a very specific sculpture. From another point of view, it is almost abstract.

*

I COULD SIMPLY SAY the image is nice to look at. That it is striking and beautiful. And leave it at that. But wait a minute. Take a closer look. The image deepens, the meaning expands.

*

HOW DID I experience the work when seeing it for the first time? Surely not with an analytic gaze. I was caught up in the mood of the exhibition, and then this image stood out.

*

A SCULPTURE, a ruin, an ominous warning.

*

IT SEEMS like a coincidence picking an artwork, regarding all the images one comes across during one’s lifetime. We see an image. We like it. The timing is right. We have some extra savings. We bring the work home. It becomes the image we see every day. It becomes decorative art. An image from which the message, meaning or mood slowly merges with the rest of the interior. The image lingers in the background, until – like now – it sort of reappears. And reminds me of something.

*

THIS IMAGE reminds me of something. Or perhaps it is more of a feeling, not a memory at all. It might even be quite the opposite: it might have to do with the future. Not a feeling, but a premonition.

*

‘WE ARE JUST a moment in time,’ laments Vincent Cavanagh of Anathema. ‘A blink of an eye. A dream for the blind.’

*

ALL THESE SONGS and all these voices, always present, ready to burst out. A song is not a memory. It is a presence. Voices always singing, though often muted, until some association turns up the volume.

*

‘TIME IS NEVER TIME at all,’ sings Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. ‘You can never ever leave, without leaving a piece of youth.’

*

ONE LIKES the image; one brings it home.

*

TOR ULVEN´S STONE AND MIRROR is organized partially as a kind of exhibition, the texts having subtitles like 'still-life,' 'installation,' 'landscape,' 'sculpture,' 'ready-made' and 'archeologic field.' The works in Captain’s Cabin could be divided into similar categories. In a sense we are invited to a museum. We are given the opportunity to see our own age as something of the past.

*

MARIT EIKEMO’S book of essays, Contemporary Ruins, also comes to mind: the feeling of walking through the remains of constructions and buildings recently built, some of them not  even finished, but already on the verge of being forgotten, bits and pieces our own communities, stories and knowledge slipping unnoticed into history.

*

I REMEMBER something now. Some of my own photographs from the 90s. One of a car wreck, another of an abandoned house, a third of a boat in a field, covered by grass. Looking at Cul-de-sac now, these amateurish images suddenly become meaningful. I see something in them I did not think about before.

*

THE MOOD of Captain’s Cabin, the combination of methods – black and white images, images inverted to negative, filters, underexposures – brought me into a state of wonder. The way houses, cars and boats were presented, created an otherworldly atmosphere, a feeling that Earth had been abandoned a long time ago. I was turned into a sleepwalker among the objects, buildings, and playgrounds, I found myself staring at strange landscapes and signs of a civilization past, nothing left but these machines and constructions, partially taken over by nature. A vision of our time depicted from a future position. I felt the distance to here and now.

*

I WAS TAKEN somewhere beyond the catastrophe. I sensed a great silence. And almost felt I had to whisper, as we moved from image to image.

*

ULVEN: 'Your own voice // on tape / it is / the reflection / that reveals / that you too / belong to // the Stone Age.'

*

I LIKE THE FACT that we get to look at art while hanging up the laundry or eating tomato soup.

*

THE THEMES and feelings that arose in the larger context of Captain’s Cabin, what I would summarize as a dark and poetic depiction of an abandoned world, are central to the work Cul-de-sac itself.

*

GROWING UP in the 80s in the rural landscape of Leirfjord, Nordland, my friends and I discovered small landfills and other remains of the past. Behind a cluster of trees, a heap of wrecked cars kept our attention for days. We played in them, broke the windows, brought parts home. We ripped off the springs from an old sofa and tied them to our shoes, and thus inventing super jump boots. We set up an orchestra, mainly consisting of percussion, beating the rusty barrels with sticks.  On a fishing trip to a lake up in the mountains, I followed an overgrown path, and came upon an old house, abandoned probably a couple of generations earlier, now threatening to collapse. The sense of history and times past fascinated me, took hold, and I would later, as a student, return to take pictures of the old house and the cars. I probably did not have a clear purpose at the time, bringing my camera for a walk in the places I had been as a child. But when I look at the pictures I chose to take, I realize that there are only various ruins and other remnants of human life in the midst of nature.

*

ALL THESE THINGS are gone now: the cars, the landfills, the house, probably removed for safety- and environmental reasons. The only traces left are the photos on my hard drive. The hard drive itself will of course end up in a dumpster somewhere, the monuments of the past themselves forgotten.

*

THE HARD DISK as a brain, filled with images, potential memories.

*

WHEN MY 2022 hard drive crashed last year, some of my favorite shots were trapped inside it, among thousands of other images. At the time I couldn’t afford to recover the files, so I just stored it my wardrobe drawer instead. It is still in there, safely wrapped in plastic, and in a sense, it is a relief. All those pictures, all those memories, all those details. Do I really need them?

*

HOW MUCH are we supposed to remember?

*

TAKING PICTURES almost every day, my own project has revolved around keeping track of time, documenting the daily events in our children’s life. To keep up, I force myself to organize and edit photos each night. I spend as much time with my camera and my images as I do without them. And while the intention has been to understand time better and somehow getting closer to the children growing up, I have instead experienced the quite opposite: a mild confusion or a misconception about the events, how they happened, where and when. The harder I try to grasp time the faster it slips through my fingers. And when printing images or receiving my albums in the mail, I often think, with a naïve disappointment: is this all there was to it? Is this all that happened?

*

WOULD I HAVE understood more just participating, being present? Or by writing a diary instead of taking photos?

*

STILL, I KEEP taking pictures. An obsession. A fear of missing out.

*

I SOMETIMES imagine the girls only see my face as a camera, and that they dream at night of this black camera lens chasing them around.

*

THERE ARE TIMES when I think of photography as destructive and as an unnatural way of looking at the world and remembering it by.

*

I GUESS I TAKE the pictures for myself. It has become a habit, or an addiction. And sometimes I recall, a little shameful, what Sontag wrote: 'Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is a friendly imitation of work; they can take pictures'. But of course, I also wish for the children to have the pictures one day, having the opportunity to leaf through their early years, just as I did with mine. Still, I wonder if the large number of photographs displaces real memory. If so, it really is a paradox if we think the photograph is meant to preserve a memory. And by the way: What memory? Whose memory? To what purpose?

*

WHEN THE LINE between looking and taking a photo becomes blurred.

*

A PHOTOGRAPH is always somewhere between a window and a mirror.

*

IN METTE KARLSVIK’S novel Darkroom, the protagonist, addressing her father, says: 'My sister and I have lots of photographs to remember our childhood. We do not have just one picture, or a handful, like you have: You have the picture from baptism, a class picture from school, and one from college. My sister and I have albums and walls covered with memories. We get a more nuanced picture of our childhood. Or do we let our memories become more shaped by photographs than your memories are.'

*
IF YOU HAVE only one photograph of yourself as a child, does your life seem poorer or richer, your memories more or less valuable?

*

A COUPLE OF hundred years ago there was no other way of recalling one’s past except through stories, drawings, objects, and other 'natural' ways of remembering. I imagine people recall their relatives and friends as voices, talking, crying, laughing, or singing. Always there, always present.

*

I TRY TO imagine a modern society like ours, only without cameras, mobiles, and photographic images.

*

MY CHILDHOOD FRIENDS and I experiencing the world by just being present.

*

PHOTO ALBUMS as personal ruins.

*

WHEN I AM in doubt, Mari tells me I must keep taking the pictures, that it is worth it, that I should not feel bad about it. The girls will appreciate it one day. And I am all good to go again.

*

AND BY THE WAY, I am not sure if preservation of memory is what interests me in family albums. I think it is about placing oneself in time and in a context, being able to tell a story, make connections, finding one’s place in the world. And this is something worth passing on. An image as a starting point from which to tell one’s story.

*

PHOTO ALBUMS as mirrors.

*

WE LOOK AT the art on our wall and see something. The years go by. We look again and see something else.

*

I REMEMBER a painting from my early childhood. I thought it was a picture of my father and my older brother and sister. When rediscovering the painting, twenty years later, I realized the characters had no relation whatsoever to my family.

*

CHILDREN INTERPRET art the same way adults do: with their own frame of reference.

*

I SHOULD ADD: My parents still have that same picture on their wall. Moving from apartment to apartment, from house to house, they always kept the same images. Some disappeared in time, the rest were kept. The pictures at my parents’ house reminds me of the rooms we have left behind. The pictures on their walls evoke memories of my early childhood in Sweden.

*

THE ROOM contains the picture, and the picture contains the rooms. We never travel very far; the past is always right by.

*

MARI’S PARENTS became friends with the French-Polish painter and printmaker Tomasz Struk in the 70s. They bought several of his prints, had them framed and put up on the walls in their house in Homme, Vigeland. They even bought more prints than they had room for, as a way of helping him out, and then passed these on to friends and acquaintances. Today the art of Tomasz Struk in Norway is therefore heavily concentrated in the Mandal area. When Mari moved to Oslo into her first apartment, she brought a couple of prints. And now, years later, Struk’s prints have ended up on our walls. Mari says that the pictures carry some of her childhood with them. And I feel that, in some way I am taking part in it, seeing what she has seen.

*

IN MY VIEW Cul-de-sac primarily deals with what remains, showing how the most familiar objects grow mysterious with time. While the theme of mortality is inherent in all photographic work, Pedersen’s image not only addresses this theme more explicitly, but raises some important questions as well.

*

THE ARTWORK as a mirror. Me sitting here, looking at myself.

*

THERE WAS A SENSE of abandonment in the series of images in Captain’s Cabin, emphasized by the depopulated scenes and scenarios. This sense is even more notable when the one image is taken home. The separate works communicated with one another, perhaps about their collective abandonment. Now this work hangs all alone on the kitchen wall, mumbling monotonously. I am sure it is some kind of warning.

*

OR THE IMAGE, presented with inverted colors, might simply be showing a water slide after closing time. As Ragnhild commented, when visiting: Cul-de-sac made her think of someone she met once who had broken into an abandoned amusement park at night.

*

OR IN THE PERSPECTIVE of the 'exhibition,' the slide as a gigantic object in an outdoor museum, framed by a fence: 'Do not touch the art.'

*

A POST-APOCALYPTIC IMAGE, a contemporary ruin, a comment on society, Cul de sac as metaphor for a difficult situation, the peak of our civilization as loss of perspective and meaningless entertainment, 'amusing ourselves to death', or just a playful piece of art.

*

THE SERIOUS themes contained in Pedersen’s image is, I think, paired with a sense of humor, or at least an absurd dimension. We could see the title of the work quite literally: for what is a water slide except a dead end?

*

HAVING WRITTEN my master thesis on Tor Ulven, and for years read his texts, his images appear in my mind from time to time, like now, looking at Cul-de-sac. And even though they are literary ones, I find them just as vivid as any visual artwork. I could as well have written about one of his literary images.

*

OR THE OTHER way around: Cul-de-sac, even though an image, speaks to me in the same way that Ulven’s texts do. I often think about seeing 'death / everywhere' with a gaze that is 'rotten. Clear. Non-political.' A kind of meditative adjustment, like putting on a pair of memento mori-glasses. When paying that visit to MELK in 2018, I felt a strong relation between this lesson from Ulven in Pedersen’s works. There was an image of a toy skeleton of some kind. This classic memento-mori motif had a cartoonish effect in this setting, and forced me to shift the perspective from this little human remain to a larger and more comprehensive threat.

*

A WATER SLIDE on the wall, a memento mori, not only telling me that I am mortal, but hanging there as a monument to the vulnerability of Earth itself. Of our descendants and of all species. A question of responsibility. An image of our age as past containing a strong warning about the future.

*

I FORGOT. We do replace our art … When we moved Cul-de-sac from the living room to the kitchen, we had to remove one of the two works by Tomasz Struk. We attached Pedersen’s work to the screw already in the concrete wall and placed the Struk on the bedroom floor, up against the wall, together with some other pictures that we do not have space for. The Struk-print was a collage showing two zebras and a living room, a sofa, and the skin of a tiger on the floor, a comment on modern times and our relation to nature. The image was replaced by a new one, telling part of the same story.

*

WE WERE GOING on a trip to the Mullsjö-area of Sweden, driving from Nödinge where we lived back then, to visit a friend of my parents (who by the way was an artist whose pictures today are on the wall at my parents’ house). There was a water slide there. I was about four years old, and what was supposed to be fun turned out to be frightening. I took the ride with my father. Coming down into the pool, my eyes and mouth filled with water, I cried. Still, I wanted another go. I cried once more. And so on. The thrill and the pain. The thrill and the pain. Amusing myself to tears. Not a dead end, but a meaningless circle.

*

TO A FUTURE human being – or an alien life-form, for that matter – how would this image be approached, as an artwork, or as an actual water slide? Would they come walking through the landscape and pause, wondering if this was a construction of practical use? A kind of aqueduct? A monument? A temple? An image of a deity? Or less hypothetically: the water slide standing in a clearing. A rattling in the bushes. A flock of birds taking off from the construction. A deer stepping out from among the trees, and then, standing still as a statue, with an upright neck, the ears rotating, scanning the area for predators.

*

I TOOK THE girls for a walk to the top of the hill. I brought my camera. There is a concrete construction up there, a small tower painted with graffiti, which served as a backdrop for my photos of the girls. I have been up there several times, but I have never been able to figure out what function the construction once had. I discover a pamphlet published online by local historians. I find that it is probably the remains of a trigonometric point, built sometime between 1904 and 1909, used for land-measuring purposes. In another source, a man recalls a walk on the hill with his father in the 60s, that there was a red light on top of the tower, and his father told him it was a signal for airplanes headed for the Fornebu airport. Yet another entry refers to the construction as a lookout point. Not long ago this construction had a meaning and a function. Now it is a meaningless monument in the middle of nature, the knowledge nearly lost, the information hard to come across: on the verge to becoming a mystery.

*

I THINK OF the exhibition at MELK. I think of my own photos. I think of Tor Ulven’s texts. I think of watching Aftersun with Mari earlier this summer, a gripping, emotional experience, now the concept itself accentuated: the video footage documenting the past, and the memories risen from the footage. I think of the old cassette I found in a box when cleaning out the shed, one that my father recorded when living in Gothenburg, of him playing the guitar, and singing. I listen to the tape, the song, the fragments of conversation, and then: a characteristic laugh. My parents’ old friend BJ, whom we visited in the mid-90s in the Arizona desert where he lived with his family. Another recording on the tape, the voice of a baby: my little brother crying. A forty-two year old cry.

*

THE STRANGE presence of Tor Ulven´s voice on the Vagant-recording from 1993, emphasizing the theme of the poem he is reading: 'Your own voice // on tape / it is / the reflection / that reveals / that you too / belong to // the Stone Age.'

*

MARI CAME HOME with a USB-stick, a digital transfer of the home videos her father made in the 80s. We watched a clip. Or: I watched, while she remembered. Or, as she put it, she always thought these were her own memories, but what she really remembered was these images. The guy in the video store told her: be sure to make a copy. I think about all the copies out there, copies of copies, all the effort to keep the past in the present. I think about everyone who every day bring the past to life for a moment. Then letting it go, forever. And I think: what about the future?

*

I THINK OF my first rooms. I think of the images on the walls throughout my childhood. I think of Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space. I think of Frances Yates’ book The Art of Memory. I think of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. I think about myself namedropping. I think of humans becoming oral storytellers becoming writers becoming image-makers. I think about how a photograph will make you remember the event. But also, how the photo will make you remember something else. I think of how one image might contain a multitude of images. I look at Cul-de-sac and think about how an image will get your thoughts and your text flowing.

*

I GUESS IT’S just me, but the gallerists, the museum intendants and the other visitors at different artist spaces always distract me. I have a hard time to focusing. Perhaps some art should be viewed at home, in peace, on the walls, in books, on the computer screen. While some images talk directly to you, some art might require a kind of meditation that take years to complete, or perhaps a lifelong meditation. Getting to know the image. Getting to know yourself.

*

I THINK about what an image opens in me, and it makes me wonder about whether I am still writing about Cul-de-sac or if I have gone off track.

*

'IN A LITTLE while I’ll be gone' sings Thom Yorke of Radiohead. 'The moment’s already passed. Yeah, it’s gone'.

*

I THINK of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor envisions the apocalypse, the nuclear explosion hitting the playground. The catastrophe has already happened. But still, she fights to prevent the catastrophe. I think of the Arizona desert and BJ laughing. How a voice heard over thirty years ago sounds real and alive in my mind. I remember they had a pool they did not use, it was dry and empty, covered with leaves and dirt, lizards running up and down the walls. A ruin in their own backyard. I think about species going extinct on a day to day-basis. I remember the orang-utan watching us at the Kristiansand Zoo this summer, and feeling regret at taking the kids there. The apathetic orang-utan, separated from us by a glass wall. The orang-utan understood. I am sure it understood it all. The story of humankind, the story of violence and expansion, of destruction and dominion. And somehow, I felt responsible for its loss of freedom, of life. I think about the future scenarios still to be prevented. I think about John Berger’s text 'Why Look at Animals.' And I think about what attitudes would change if one knew, or if one had the imagination to envision the end of the world.

*

I REMEMBER unwrapping Cul-de-sac, the kids popping the bubble wrap. The artwork leaned up against the wall before we put it up. The total silence of the image. Not even the sound of birds. No one soon to stroll past the monument. Perhaps the wind might sweep by. But no one will be there to hear or feel it. I think about our world, depopulated. I think about the planet.

*

I THINK about my children when I no longer exist, having left them tens of thousands of photos, traces of what I saw and how I looked at the world. Traces of the children themselves. Perhaps it will all be meaningless to them. Or just too much to work their way through. Or perhaps it will be of some use, entertaining at least. I think about what other ruins they will inherit, what will be left for them to interpret that we now take for granted. What extinct animals will be added to the list. And looking at Cul-de-sac, I also wonder who of them would want to inherit this work of art. If it has made an impression. Talking to Martin B. at the office, he told me that when his grandfather passed away, and the house was being sold, his mother insisted on having the one picture that had meant so much to her, one that felt as part of her childhood.

*

ARTWORK ON THE WALL as identity, as feelings, as evidence, as an extended family-album of shared or personal memories.

*

I WAS RAISED evangelical and was taught that Adam and Eve were historical persons, that humanity had existed for 5,000 years. I was also told that Jesus would pick us up at any time. I think that carrying a mental time span like that somewhat frees one from responsibility. The faithful will be saved in the end anyway, and there will be ‘a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away.’ One day, or rather gradually, I must have felt a change, feeling the responsibility of being a part of the slow-moving nature, no longer a part of a divine plan. Another version of me, walking through the landscapes of Captain’s Cabin, might have read the rapture into the images. Jesus having picked up all the believers. The horror scenario of the unbelievers left behind.

*

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC work Sixtytwo Gasoline Stations by Jan Freuchen shows images of 62 different stations overturned by storms and hurricanes. The artist himself says he was struck by the paradox in that the gas stations had collapsed because of the extreme weather, which the combustion of the gasoline itself had helped accelerate. When visiting the new National Museum recently, I stood there looking at this series of images. Of course, I saw only ruins. 62 contemporary ruins. An image of an age soon to be over. While the gas stations in Ed Ruscha’s work Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) were functional, and Freuchen’s Sixtytwo Gasoline Stations (2017) were destroyed, there will come a time when all gas stations will be scattered throughout the face of Earth as mysterious constructions, temples, shelters, overtaken by nature and the animal kingdom. I think of the lion in 12 Monkeys walking high up on a building, covered with snow and ice. Then I hear the music from The Jungle Book coming from the living room, remembering the abandoned temple with the orang-utan King Louis sitting on a throne.

*

IN MY TEENAGE years, the nearest gas station was right down the road, in Leirosen, by the river running into the sea. We bought candy there and rented VHS movies, and when I got my moped, I filled up the tank there. It is strange now, coming home, seeing only asphalt and concrete remains where the fuel pumps once stood. In summertime, this place was crowded, or so I remember it, locals and tourists inside and traffic outside, this being the road between Mosjøen and Sandnessjøen at the time. Now there’s a tunnel going straight through the mountain a little further up the river, and no one ever comes here anymore. There is a feeling of abandonment, of something missing. And I do not think it concerns only my personal past. It is not the pure nostalgia of Cliffhanger, Hockeypulver, Bugg, Kræsj Pink. This is also about communities dissolving. The ruins of recently inhabited houses. The abandoned shopping streets and the new shopping center. The closed rural schools. The small farms forced to leave the work to large-scale production. This has to do with political decisions. With certain ways of living. With taking care of nature, each other, the animals, the living creatures of the Earth.

*

I SEARCH FOR 'free negative scanner app,' download one, and take a picture of Cul-de-sac with my phone. After processing, the picture shows the laundry on the rack in negative colors, and Cul-de-sac on the wall above, now with a sunlit, blue sky, green trees in the background, and a turquoise slide. As if telling me there are other possibilities, that there still are alternative futures.

*

EVEN THOUGH WE believe the catastrophe has already happened, and even though we believe the end of the world is unavoidable, there is still a choice of limiting the damages for they who are born tomorrow, within next year and in ten years.

*

WHY IS IT so hard to imagine a world without us? To imagine the existence of those who lived before, or those who shall live after we are gone? Why is it so hard to imagine the end of everything? Religious doomsday visions and disaster movies are part of our culture, but we have difficulty accepting the fact that life on the planet is slowly collapsing. And that may be problem: while technology and our knowledge of how to behave are changing too fast for us to keep up, the destruction of the planet happening too slowly for us to comprehend. The end of the world is not about fire and brimstone. It is an almost invisible, silent death that is happening as we speak. Perhaps a mythical image of The Beginning might be an appropriate image of The End: 'And the spirit of God hovered over the waters' as the last sentence of the last chapter. A simple image. The Earth. Desolate and empty, covered with water. And a wind making waves over the world.

*

ULVEN: 'Sit beside me / my dear, tell me // about the time / when I no longer // exist.'

*

WHILE WATCHING a seagull soar past the kitchen window, I remember reading that this area, this hill, this old volcano, now 200 meters above sea level, was once covered with water. Instead of a seagull searching for leftover food, there would be a Pliosaurus hunting for fish around this underwater hillside. In some million years, this landscape might once again be covered by the sea.

*

I IMAGE a series of 'Sixtytwo Water Slides.' I start googling 'Abandoned water slides' and 'Abandoned water parks.'

*

LOOKING AT ART or reading books will not get us anywhere in itself. But new perspectives might make us organize differently, vote, talk and write differently. I see a glimmer of hope here. The art that opens our imagination to possible versions of the future is an important addition, or even a path, to explicit political art and activism. We need to imagine the horror. And then we need to strengthen our hope.

*

THE SMALL PASTS AND FUTURES of our private lives, our family lives, our children´s lives and the collective past and futures of the Earth: They are all connected, impossible to separate.

*

IN SHORT: we are here, right now. Between not being here and not being here.

*

IN THE ever-increasing stream of visual impressions, at a time when we seem to not notice that we live in an image-based world, visual art could play a crucial role. Photographic works that insist on their uniqueness and strength as an art form, and that address both with how we look at images and of what it means to be here right now. We need images that speak of our time in a different way than the online news or through what we see scrolling down our Instagram-feed, we need works that make us pause for a while and just keep looking at that one image.

*

REST OUR EYES by looking, rest our minds by thinking, recharge by meditating.

*

PEDERSEN’S WORKS stand out visually. So, we pause. And we take our time. Because we notice something. There is a seriousness in the expression. We ourselves are taken seriously. The works seem to have been created out of necessity. The feeling that something is at stake. Her art has lasting qualities. On the one hand it is open and timeless, and on the other hand she makes us see our own time from unexpected angles. We have all seen a water slide before. But not like this. We have all seen our world before. But not like this. Her art makes us reflect not only on photography and its relationship with the world, but also on our place in it.

*

SOMETIMES I REACH for Tor Ulven’s book of collected poems on the top shelf to get a quick fix of existential insights on time and mortality. Or just to get a feeling of time. From now on I will probably step into the kitchen and just pause in front of this photograph for a while, to approach the same kind of feeling.

*

Cul-de-sac merges with the background and completes the kitchen section. A new day is about to begin. It seems it will be a hot one. Maybe we should go to Frognerparken, and introduce the kids to the water slide?

The lines from the Ulven poem ‘Your own voice // on tape …’ were translated into English by Benjamin Mier-Cruz as part of an interview published on thewhitereview.com. All other translations are my own.

Linn Pedersen - Captain's Cabin - MELK

SHIRIN NESHAT

One Image chosen by Nina Strand:

It is a meeting at a crossroads. A man walks towards a woman on the other side of the road. They sneak glances at each other as they pass, and keep on walking. He stops and looks back at her and smiles. But they keep on walking, both headed to the same place, though taking different routes.

Next scene: The man and woman meet again, with a curtain between them; a mullah is preaching about chastity. They look at each other through the blinds. At one point the woman has heard enough and leaves. He follows shortly afterwards, but again they walk away from each other. I want them to meet, we all do, but they never will.

The two-channel video Fervor by Shirin Neshat from 2000 was filmed in Morocco, but purports to be Iran. Shown now in the 30-year jubilee show Before Tomorrow for Astrup Fearnley in Oslo, it is unfortunately still topical today. I see it after having had a swim, and think about the two never meeting while walking home, my wet hair made wetter still by the summer rain. I think about my luck to be living as a woman here, and not there. And then I remember a recent conversation with a friend about the chances he felt he’d missed, and the imaginary family life he’d envisioned. He’s fifty and says it’s over; he doesn’t think it will ever happen for him.

Also on view in Before Tomorrow is Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff's 1999 photograph Mom and Dad Are Making Out. Two human bodies form a cross, the woman balanced on the man’s back with her legs in the air. The joyful colour contrasts with Neshat’s passionate black and white. These two people, mom and dad, did actually make it together. We can still make it too.

Still, Shirin Neshat, Fervor, 2000

Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, Mom and dad are making out, 1999.

TALA MADANI

Afterimage by Lillian Davies:

Rushing through yet another art fair last fall in Paris, a small canvas stopped me dead in my tracks. Iranian-born, Californian by choice, Tala Madani is an artist I first heard about in painters’ studios. Artist Xinyi Cheng, for one, is a fan. Inside the fair tent, set up over the park and playgrounds of Champ de Mars, I’d spotted one of Madani’s latest canvases: a muddy zigzag in glossy oil paint on a white gessoed square.

‘She’s made an abecedarium out of them. This one is Zed. From the Shit Mom series,’ a fashionable British gallerist brightly explained. ‘There’s one for each letter of the alphabet! Would you like me to send you more information?’Scribbling my email address in her tanned leather notebook, before admitting I’m a writer, not a collector, I asked the price: ‘30,000 euros.’

Warmly embraced by the art world, in the language it speaks best, Madani is nonetheless a skilled social commentator, taking aim at received ideas about value and gender as perpetuated in traditions of painting and motherhood. With children of her own, Madani explains that her Shit Mom character emerged after her first  was born. She was exhausted by a certain sentimentality that had crept into her work, and wanted to come to terms with the prevailing model of a sacred Mother and Child.

In addition to her ABCs on canvas, Madani’s created a single channel animation featuring her Shit Mom character. Her gallerists helpfully shared a link to the work on Vimeo, but it wasn’t until this spring, tunneling through a press visit at Palais de Tokyo, that I saw this work projected full size. Until January  2024, Madani’s Shit Mom Animation 1 (2021) will illuminate an entire gaping room of Hugo Vitrani and Violette Wood’s group exhibition La Morsure de Termites (The bite of the termites).

Made with wide strokes of earthy brown, Madani’s animated figure betrays a feminine silhouette. Her hips flare wider than her shoulders. She’s given birth, voie basse. And she’s tired. Moving languidly as if from one room to another, her animated form sways across a series of static interior photographs. Reminiscent of the Hearst Castle or a gaudy spread from a late 70s Architectural Digest, Madani’s Shit Mom smears across a white bedspread, beige couches, and a lacquered dining table surrounded by mock Old Master paintings. She marks nearly every item of furniture with her signature burnt sienna. Like a dung beetle, rolling her ball of feces for food and breeding (symbol, for the ancient Egyptians, of the rising sun), Madani’s Shit Mom radiates across her bourgeois landscape in colors of excrement.

For her canvases in this series, Madani employs an unctuous pigment, like chocolate frosting on a child’s birthday cake. And she replays this sticky glimmer in her animated film. A recipe for a nauseating attraction and repulsion, Madani’s glossy surface juxtaposes gluttonous desire with visceral disgust at an eventual defecation. Reveling in the play of painting, the beauty of this creature is that she is both destructive and fecund. Like a heap of steaming compost, she is nutritive. Armed with comedy and a fertile motif, Madani tackles motherhood’s oppressive myth making: injunctions of purity and serenity that persist across cultures and over time. Shit Mom is a foil for la Madonna. And a Virgin? Far from it. She acts on her desire for sexual pleasure.

This spring, writer Jiayang Fan published her story ‘A mother’s exchange for her daughter’s future.’Fan describes shit running down her mother’s leg as she lies in her hospital bed, nearing the end of her days. Trying to finish her first book, Fan observes her mother’s impatience as she points her frail fingers at an alphabet card: DEADLINE. Her question of just when Fan will get her creative work out is also a question about whether she’s ready to let her story show itself in colors of an overflowing colostomy bag and a soiled vitrine. Fan’s story is an exquisite attempt. And like the place she writes from, Madani also works from the insides, what’s left. Because, that, really, is all we’ve got. It’s fertile, shit. The stuff of a life’s work.

Installation images from Shit Mom Animation 1 2021, by Tala Madani at Palais de Tokyo taken by Aurélien Mole.

MARIA PASENAU

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

On my mind an image by Maria Pasenau, intimately exposing herself and her fiancé in a show about herpes. Standing in a small cubicle in the gallery’s cellar, covered in wallpaper containing a mix of patterns and positive and negative portraits of the fiancé, feels like being in their love-making room. On the three walls, many photographs and drawings are installed salon-style, showing viewers absolutely everything of  their relationship, and I find myself worrying about the exposure. Many of the photographs depict their genitals in close-up. I feel safer laughing over the drawing of the mind map about what’s good and bad about herpes, where every thought reads:‘It Hurts’. 

There’s a triptych where Pasenau undresses in a field full of yellow flowers. The way her garment gets stuck on her head in the last one also makes me smile. On the other wall is a picture of her partner in a similar field. Their love for one another is so clear. These works ease the Peeping Tom feeling I had in the rest of the show. I felt like a voyeur, but honestly, who owns the gaze here? She does, because she’s behind the camera as well as in front of it, and I wonder why I can’t see a young woman in love, having sex, without thinking protective thoughts about how she should cover up, show less, hide the images in private albums, when in fact maybe she should do more of this. She’s taking over from Goldin and others working with slice-of-life self portraits, continuing to challenge our inhibitions and prejudices. Enough of my scepticism. She’s got it right.

Maria Pasenau, In the middle of my actions, 2022.

SHEYI BANKALE

1968 Olympics Black Power Salute, Mexico City, signed by Tommy Smith, photographer unknown / AP, gifted to Autograph ABP by Iqbal Wahhab, courtesy of: Autograph ABP

Afterimage by Sheyi Bankale:

With the euphoria of the London Olympic games, photographs of sporting moments form fixed notions of symbolic endeavour that inspire and create role-models. The one photograph that captures this notion for me best, is the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute by athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympic games.

Ever since I first came across this image, it has been on my mind. Charged with human and civil rights protest, it played with the idea that Smith and Carlos gave us the answers, with just one symbolic gesture. The gesture rose questions of belief, courage, sacrifice and dignity. Under the gaze of the world, Smith and Carlos faced their respected flag and listened to the Star-Spangled Banner anthem. They both raised a fist, coated in black leather gloves, penetrating the dark sky until the anthem had finished.

The emotional experience conveyed in this symbolic act, following years of training and commitment as athletes, will forever resonate with me.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Wolfgang Tillmans, Adam’s Crotch, 1991 

Afterimage by Sarah Moroz:

“Sloppy has always been good, meant sexy,” Eileen Myles wrote in her iconic book Chelsea Girls. I would agree with Eileen. Her statement is contemporaneous with when Wolfgang Tillmans was photographing youth culture, in the first half of the ‘90s. His images depict people who are sloppy in the most gratifying sense: casual, heedless, uninhibited. He captures a state of being, a shrugging feeling that trickles down to posture and style. The Berlin Wall had come down, and ideas of structure and stability wobbled profoundly along with it — what could be re-conceived? Everything. Anything.

Tillmans counters photographic flatness through sheer proximity to the body, in almost invasive close-up: right up in an armpit with sweaty tufts of hair, right up alongside the shimmer of sweat slicking the clavicle. In Adam’s Crotch, ripped, fringed, scuffed, hole-riddled jeans go beyond heavy wear to a reflection of living hard: thighs rubbing together for all-consuming movements and reckless experiences, which translate into garments shredded thin, patchworked back together — and still are coming undone. Whatever party has been cut out of the frame out can still be felt from the tight crop. Hands resting lightly, underwear showing indifferently: there’s a serenity to not fretting about what looks appropriate, because propriety is a myth.

The photo is simply a display of being comfortable in a laissez-faire setting; it’s observing leisure and idleness. A close-up of a crotch could ostensibly be an aggressive move, but here it speaks to ease between photographer and subject, the camaraderie of not having to be polite and careful: that Adam’s boundaries melt into Wolfgang’s.

ZOE LEONARD

Afterimage by Brian Sholis:

Consider American artist Zoe Leonard’s recent photographs, presented in New York in an exhibition titled In the Wake. They depict family snapshots from the period after World War II when her forebears were stateless. The original images, taken as her family fled from Warsaw to Italy to London to the United States over the course of more than a decade, offer scenes of intimacy that contrast with the era’s international clashes and their messy aftermaths. Leonard, in re-photographing the originals, opted not to reconstruct lost moments, to close the gap between then and now. Instead, she examines the earlier photographs as printed objects that bear physical evidence of their own histories: we see scratches and other blemishes, edges of paper curling upward. Sometimes, too, Leonard aims her camera from an oblique angle, shrouding the original subject with a splash of reflected light and revealing a wavy postmark. (These objects made the same journeys as their subjects.) She flips one photograph to document its inscription. “It’s not that one sees less,” Leonard has explained of these works, “but that different information becomes visible.”

Leonard’s artworks are in the “wake” of the originals in multiple senses. A wake is the path behind a ship marked by choppy waters – a useful metaphor for migrants seeking safe harbor, as the pictures’ subjects are doing, or for the compositions, in which the originals “float” against featureless backgrounds. A wake is also the act of keeping watch with the dead, of meditating on lives as they were lived. For every migrant who forged a life in a new home, as did some of Leonard’s family members, there are others who could not. And to “wake” is to come to consciousness, to become alert to the world around you when before you were unaware. The narrative emphasis placed on their subjects’ statelessness ensures the pictures’ relevance in our present moment of geopolitical instability and its attendant migrations. These intimate pictures are linked to – awaken us to – some of the broadest and most pressing social concerns of the day. Many of the original pictures are bounded by thin white borders. By re-photographing them and placing them within this conceptual and narrative frame-work, Leonard ensures that the meanings they convey are not similarly restricted. We know little about the lives of the people depicted, the knowledge of which remains the province of Leonard and those close to her. But in imagining those stories, empathy compels us to relate at both intimate and grand scales.

JULIAN FAULHABER

Afterimage by Jenny Rydhagen:

Tankstelle, 2008, © Julian Faulhaber / VG Bildkunst.

I’m currently looking a lot at images like this, which are in a kind of hybrid state between the hyperreal and the abstract, between fact and fiction. It is perhaps not this particular photograph by Julian Faulhaber that fascinates me, but rather the type of photography it represents, images that with crystal clear sharpness depict something with a detailed and zealous attention and yet does not really reveal anything. The image is as expressive as an architectural rendering and I find it both repulsive and attractive this lack of signs or clues. I don't quite know where to fix my gaze in this image, it sweeps over the polished surfaces in search of a little friction, for a rustle on the ground, a withered strand of grit, a crack in the perfection, until it is finally sucked into the darkness somewhere behind the petrol pumps. I’m trying very hard to get into a place I don't really want to be.

PATTI SMITH

Afterimage by Ingvild Langgård:

This photograph of young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, was taken by an old man with a box camera on Coney Island in 1969. The image is used on the cover of Smith's book Just Kids, which revolves around the relationship between the two, and on how they together began their respective artistic careers.

I have seen several iconic images of these two, together and apart, but this one is still on my mind. There is something snapshot-like about it, while at the same time it's a fantastic portrait. You can see how it was them who initiated the image, wishing to preserve a moment in time.

There's something reserved and graceful and at the same time mysterious about them, as if they already know something, something great and fantastic. The picture was taken before either of them became famous artists in their respective fields.

It is of two young people, hoping to become something, but right there and then only hanging around. They wanted to document themselves then and there, and had, according to the book, put a lot of effort into their appearance.

That the picture is from Coney Island, is of course no coincidence, and the place becomes here, as often else, a character in itself: the very incarnation of nostalgia connected with the future. Although my reading is of course charged with what Smith and Mapplethorpe achieved later, we have all of us stood there, just like that, on Coney Island.

EIRIN STØEN

Afterimage by Maria Veie:

This is an image still processing in my mind, which isn’t a photograph on its own but a documentation of a work I haven't experienced, but which I still try to interpret. Ivan Galuzin invited Eirin Støen for a one night only at Brown Dude Projectspace. I didn’t make it in time to Sørligata's old factory premises in Oslo, but I’m nevertheless bewitched by the work as a photograph. Støen had, with simple means, climbed to heaven in Perfect Strangers (2010). A ladder of untreated wood, lashed together by wooden ropes that looked as if they were from the mountains, leaned against an open skylight window. I don’t know wether the audience could actually climb the ladder, but Støen as an artist had all the power in the documentary process, and makes the view part of her work. In the photograph that was shared on social media, we see a sun-filled, classical city loft, partly filled with old furniture. Støen's image makes a radical shift. Some would say that she’s s just built a ladder of rope and branches and set it up against a window. But the genius move to me lies in the choice of angle. The light from the skylight dazzles the viewer, making you feel enveloped in total darkness. 

This contribution has been featured in a previous issue of Objektiv.

NAN GOLDIN

Afterimage by Tomas Lagermand Lundme:

In 2001, Nan Goldin took photographs of a couple, Jens and Clemens, somewhere in Paris. Back then, no one knew what to expect, because they were waiting for something else. Back then, love was enough in many ways. It was all still playing out to the soundtrack of the 90s, when walls, fences, eastern blocks and cheap techno music fell to the ground, allowing people to meet at eye level in places that needed an embrace. There were many places that needed embracing. The same year Goldin took her photos of Clemens and Jens, another war broke out. The war of fear. All wars bear their own name.

I was in Paris in January 2020. By then, Paris had experienced its own war. A war of pain. This war tore out everyone’s hearts. A war that seems impossible to win does this to you. At the airport, people were already talking about something coming. You should report any flu-like symptoms. I always have symptoms, if I'm asked. Not that I'm a hypochondriac. More because I have anxiety, and anxiety sets the symptoms in motion. I rarely travel alone because I have anxiety about that too, so I had my husband with me. We didn’t fail the test, so we could go to the old Jewish quarter. We’ve made a rule never to be in Paris without going there for a falafel. Only Tel Aviv and the Turkish area of Berlin can beat that taste. My husband says it’s the spice. I say it's the love. You can always taste it.

We were in Paris for a long time. We should have been there even longer, but something began to happen. It closed the world down. We flew back to Denmark in the middle of the night in March. I thought this war should have a name. I wrote down many suggestions in my notebook. I didn't need to find the culprit, to vilify a nation or a bat. Everyone has carried something with them of this war, in which we all, in our own way, became both soldiers and our own enemies. I thought we could learn something from it. Not the postulating platitudes of community triggered by retreating, staying at home in what quickly became our little fortresses. From there, we could engage in our own strategies and systems, deploying a cold, unhelpful militia that did nothing but fall into trenches that only got deeper and deeper. No, I thought, we could learn something else. I walked around the Danish forests, hoping we would learn something from them.

When I came back from Paris, I went into exile. I got to know the silence. That must be the name of the war. Because it created the spaces that I think we needed. We didn't need death. You rarely do. But we needed the pause. I've lived in a forest for a long time. A forest that's miles away from Paris and Nan Goldin. Far away from Clemens and Jens. But not from love. And I guess that's what we've learned. Not that this was or is the decade of love or fever. It's a different virus altogether. Silence has a different voice, a different war. We were wounded by those shots.

We all have someone we've lost. There are still many places that need an embrace. We know that again. And we’ve learned to act on it. So I hope that's what we will do. All of us from the old world who have moved on and have started living in a new world. When I came back to the city, I stood in my own driveway and embraced my husband. Nan Goldin should photograph it one day.