A major book launch to present the documentary projects of seven gifted photographers has been scheduled for 6 p.m. on Thursday, 12 October, at Vega Scene in Oslo. The NJP photographers will present their work the.
The Norwegian Journal of Photography was established in 2010 to bring together and support selected Norwegian documentary photography projects. The aim is to cultivate the photography community in Norway and to create an inspiring forum where Norwegian photographers can showcase their work both nationally and internationally.
Over the past two years, the photographers have participated in seminars, workshops and gatherings featuring prominent international guest speakers. Now the book, the sixth in a series published by Journal, is being launched to unveil the results of their efforts.
Photographer Hilde Honerud has been working on the project entitled Reality Slipped Into a Symbol, from the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesvos in Greece. She has spent time with migrants who play sports through the organisation known as ‘Yoga and Sports with Refugees’. Honerud's motivation for the process has been visual as well as intellectual. By manipulating the images, she wants to make the viewer question the truth value of the photographs. She wants to disrupt documentary reading to push observers to question the objectivity of the images, inviting them to segue from representation to immediate experience.
Giulia Mangione has travelled through Europe and the USA, exploring how belonging to a community or sect can make people feel protected from what they fear: the end of the world. The project Crack of Doom is about believing in and fearing the apocalypse. Mangione travelled from the Greek island of Patmos to La Palma in the Canary Islands, and then took an extended road trip in the US. While travelling, she sought out preppers, religious cults and bunker dwellers in an attempt to understand how society prepares to face potentially catastrophic events, and to explore what scares us most - the unknown.
Photographer Lars Martin Hunstad grew up in the far north of Norway. With his project In the Land of the Midnight Sun, the photographer has returned to the region. As an adult, Hunstad became aware of the preconceived notions people have about the northern part of Norway. Many romanticise the region, believing it to be untouched and pristine, a place where nature and society are seamlessly interwoven. A place that is synonymous with tranquillity, isolation and distance. In creating this project, the photographer strives to show how much more complex this region actually is. The High North both attracts and repels, offering a life that some people want to escape, while others seek it out.
Matthis Kleeb has documented some of the consequences the West's overconsumption of clothing have on people in Africa in his project From Trend to Trash. Kleeb travelled to Kenya, where he spent time with the people who live off and amidst the clothing waste of consumers and clothing manufacturers in the West. Ninety-seven per cent of the clothes donated to charities like UFF or Fretex are exported to low-cost countries. In addition, clothing manufacturers themselves throw away countless tonnes of new, unused garments. The vast majority of these end up in massive landfills and endless mountains of clothing in countries like Kenya.
Erle M. Kyllingmark's project Flower Tree Person is about the importance of diversity in all living things. In 1984, George Sessions and Arne Næss developed the eight basic principles of deep ecology. Photographer Kyllingmark uses photography to explore the flourishing and interconnected life described by Næss and Sessions. She photographs flowers on film. She subsequently rewinds the exposed rolls, then photographs trees on the same films. When spring arrives, she finds people. Intuitively, Kyllingmark puts the people together with a flower and a tree, on the same rolls that are now passing through the camera for the third time. The interweaving is the result of how the three different exposures blend on analogue film.
Photographer Jo Straube's images tell the story of a seemingly traditional family consisting of a mother, father and two children that was transformed into a family with two children and two mothers. The project We don't say dad anymore follows the final years of gender-affirming treatment. At age 13, she started to feel uncomfortable as a boy. Eventually, it was impossible to pretend that nothing was wrong. She found a girlfriend and confided her secret. The two are still together and they have two daughters. She was eventually able to start the gender affirmation process, which took six years. Family life continues as before - but something is different.
Simen R. Ulvestad's work Twenty Minutes Away focuses on memory, identity and reality. It began as an attempt to find a family member who had been gone for most of the photographer’s life. The man’s name was Leif, and he was an alcoholic in addition to being Ulvestad's grandfather. That was all the photographer knew about him. The only visual memory he had of his grandfather was from when he was a child. He remembered his grandfather's hand, holding a cigarette. Driven by curiosity, the photographer put together different visual pieces to learn more about the story of his grandfather.