Uncertain States Scandinavia Issue 1

Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød

Inga Björk

Anne Lise Flavik

Ingvild Melberg Eikeland

Janne Amalie Svit

Magdalena Kotkowska

Merete Haseth

Mona Ødegård

Ole Brodersen

Daylights

Fear has no name

Photography

Of birds and men

Pagan Poetry

The Gardens

The Sleepwalkers Chronicles

Nice Bitch

Trespassing

Credit: Ole Brodersen

ISSUE 01

Issue 01

Mona Ødegård “Nice Bitch” Unfortunately the tail too high.

Good type, should be in a better confident with himself. Could have better ears and coat Really nice bitch, I am really sorry for her bite. Very nice size. Very beautiful feminine head. Excellent ears.

Very nice movements. Nice presentation. Very feminine. Strong bitch, good head and expression Nice bitch. Good size. Head could be better. I like her body very much. Cute bitch. Feminine and good head. Nice eyes. Moves well. Lovely heavy bitch. www.monamonamona.com www.ucsscandinavia.com

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Issue 01

Anne Lise Flavik It is as difficult to define the term photography as it is to define love.

There is always something to learn from others.

The moment you feel you have nothing more to learn are you in danger of allowing yourself to be lulled into a state of self-satisfaction. Habit creates blind spots! Remember that!

Let me quote some of the world’s most renowned photographers. One must be present in the moment. It is all about timing. Risking one’s life to be able to tell the world a story, everyone relates their stories by means of a camera.

The war photographers, James Nachtwey: “I do not want the people to feel guilty for what they have, but appreciate what they have, put it in prospective and understand that not everyone in the world has these things.”

The French photographer Sarah Moon says: “It is wonderful to see photographers who use the same tools, yet have such different personalities.

I love it because it shows there are so many ways to express with the camera.”

When asked, “Can we expect some colour work from you in the future?” Joel Peter Witkin, uncompromising in his art, simply replied, “Only if I bleed”.

Octogenarian, William Klein (the angry American) is open to new ideas: “I do have a digital camera, but I do not use it that much. However, I love gadgets and I love all these new things. If it can help you to say things you haven’t been able to communicate or do before, I am all for it!”

Joyce Tenneson searches for that inner voice: “I still think there is a deep insight I have not touched yet, and that makes me feel very sad”.

Lois Greenfield - not an easy-peasy match: “Get there by doing it; you just don’t arrive there on a jet plane! So that is my advice to young photographers.”

I have through the years learnt that there are some attributes necessary to succeed.

Enthusiasm, hard work and talent. One can manage with just two of these attributes, providing that one is enthusiasm. Without engagement and enthusiasm, the project would grind to a halt.

Each and everyone may call themselves an art photographer. There are many ways one can express oneself through the camera!

The differentiator is the precise moment the photographer chooses to push the button. Do you do your absolute best or merely your second best?

Find your inner voice.

I have often been paging through hopeful photographers’ portfolios with their “I would love to exhibit” intentions, both in Norway and abroad. This is the platform whereby they can receive feedback and so I always ask this question: “What is on your mind?”

I have enormous respect for those who are loyal to their choice and motivation. Prague’s famous photographer, Josef Sudek, who carried his large

format camera around the beautiful city, did not just randomly click! One of his projects was photographing from his two studio windows, one facing towards the street with rows of buildings, the other towards his back garden where an apple tree stood centre stage. He photographed these two motifs over a 14-year period, through all four seasons, both day and night and named this “The window in my studio”. This, I call dedication to a project. Passion!

We live at a time where we have stopped LOOKING AT images - we consume them.

This is happening at a time where photography, as the fundamental distributor of culture, has a more significant role than ever before in human history.

Loads of crap also unfortunately flood us!

Non-critical distribution of photos without a goal, meaning or quality, the challenge is understanding how we should use the photographic alphabet.

There are countless genre images, from pornography, war and selfies to nature, art and portraits, with these often being mixed in amongst themselves.

We need arenas, like respected magazines, inand outdoor showrooms and teaching platforms that focus on the photographic AB and C’s. In our democracy, it is imperative to allow art to flourish and cross boundaries, something we are completely dependent upon in today’s society.

Art and culture can accomplish this in an entirely different fashion than most of us are able to express both emotionally or intellectually.

Let us just for a moment focus on the creative imagination! The right and left halves of the brain, the left being analytical and rational, the right encompassing emotions and creativity. In order to be able to express one’s self with the help of a camera, one must be willing to embark on a journey of discovery.

Is your curiosity aroused?

Are you interested in new experiences or are you satisfied with it’s good enough and fall under the category I will do my second best?

There is no limit to how good you can become as a photographer! Do not restrain yourself!

Some of you may remember when Kodak released the advertisement: “So easy, even mother can do it!” OR “You push the button and Kodak does the rest!”

However, it all began a long time prior to that advertisement.

The need to express one’s self visually, awareness to create a copy of reality. I refer to cave paintings that are over 40,800 years old.

In all probability, the Neanderthals created the handprints found in the El Castillo caves in northern Spain. 40,000 years ago, our short of stature and heavier built antecedents lived in Europe, which coincides with the time when archaeological finds suggest that Homo sapiens made their entry.

In comparison, scientists believe the alphabet is 3500 years old! This means that the evolution of the brain is more developed in its visual than its verbal communication. Icons were used in order that the illiterate understand religious messages, a fact which still occurs in present day society.

During the Renaissance period, paintings and pictures included symbols and allegories, a practise still common today. Therefore, visual communication is older, much older. Is creating images the world’s oldest profession?

Visual communication soon found a central role amongst the clans and remains a vital historical role model for us in the present. Documentation.

Quality.

There exists an ABC or a visual alphabet, something comforting to the eye, repetition in patterns and in colours. Yes! We embrace what we know and love, what we have seen before, the curse of recognition. Here exists an ABC. For this reason it is important to learn a craft, and therefore significant to have places to visit to view great photography, get refills and knowledge.

We must develop the arenas, so that everyone has the chance to photograph.

We must ensure that we touch people’s hearts and manoeuvre debates in different ways. We often refer to art and culture as ‘cosy experiences that everyone should like’, but art should provoke, offend, be to the point and occasionally aggressive.

Our community should be forever grateful and happy for the existence of those artists who dare to challenge the norm and who bring art to the forefront. They are the ones who stretch limitations to their breaking point.

Fotografihuset (Norway House of Photography) SOON TO BE RENAMED! Based on Oslo, Norway is about to launch its first national and international photographic centre, and it will be a living centre with room for diversity.

The main priority will be the creation of a lifestyle concept in conjunction with Fotografihuset. A place to meet people with a common interest, have a bite to eat, a glass of liquid refreshment, view photographs, buy books, chill, discuss, learn something new, expand one’s knowledge and horizons, make new acquaintances or meet the old.

During the next two years (2016/17) we remain in the project phase before we can throw open our doors.

Finally, something to contemplate: How do we know what we want from art, before we actually see it? If no one shows us anything new, will everything be as it always has and we remain scared of changes and new expressions?

Will the business community decide what good culture and art is? They usually want what they have seen before. Is it because that is what we know or is it that we love repetition?

We note 2016 and 177 years of photography! Let the art flourish!

Anne Lise Flavik Project Manager & photographer Fotografihuset 2016

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Issue 01

Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød Daylights is my most recent project and is depicting my perception of our “busy” time. The title of this project describes the concept behind these images and is a play on the word daylight. I am taking photographs and documenting artificial light sources, lamps, outside during daytime.

see in the dark. The absence of light in parks, streets and, I guess, traffic intersections could otherwise create chaos and dangerous situations.

Some times we need it to move around, communicate, prepare the food we eat and to wake up in the morning before the sun has risen.

The images are taken in Norway, Sweden and England and show how profound the relationship is between people living there and electricity. I always bring film and camera with me and for the past two years I have taken hundreds of pictures of these lamps.

A very long time ago the first people roamed the earth as hunter-gatherers. A lot has changed since then and the human brain has grown along side with our cultural and linguistic complexity, dietary needs and technological prowess. We started keeping animals, extract stone from the earth and make sense of our language. And then there was Edison.. This self-taught inventor provided us humans with generators, wires and cables, switches, meters and electric bulbs so that we could have artificial light. Artificial light must have been a bizarre dream for the first people but I am sure that they thought about it or else we would not be where we are today.

I first noticed the lamps in backwards Hatfield where the light was turned off at night but stayed on during the day. I associated this to modern human behaviour and our relationship with electricity. All of a sudden I saw how far from the earthly we have come, and how what is natural has been replaced by something that is both simple and practical, namely a light switch. One example is how people often leave the outside light on by their doors when they leave for work in the morning as there is a chance it might be dark when they get home in the evening. My thoughts are that it is most irresponsible to leave the lights on, but at the same time I understand why we do so.

Thanks to electricity we can see and even experience things around us that would otherwise be impossible. Pictures come alive, alarms warn us or wake us up, we can read instant messages from our friends on an electric device. We have become very dependent on electrical energy. We need it so that we can power artificial lighting to

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History proves that we do not necessarily need electricity, as we have survived two million years without it, but now that we have it, we simply cannot do without it. Now, is it then so weird that we leave the lights on when we go to work in the morning, or that we let Christmas lights stay up until March? astrid@ucsscandinavia.com www.astrid-gs.com

Issue 01

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Issue 01

Ole Brodersen It is not down on any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale The forces of nature are natural phenomena always present in a landscape, beyond human control. Ole Brodersen‘s work is dedicated to unveiling this presence by exploring encounters between manmade objects and untouched nature.

Brodersen grew up in Lyngør, a car-free archipelago in southern Norway. His family has been living here for 12 generations. Ole‘s father is a sail maker and his grandfather was a sailor.

He rowed to school and sailed from the age of 6.

The mainland appears to him as static, firm and controllable. The ocean, on the other hand, is like an unconquered frontier of nature. Living on this threshold, you learn to be sensitive to its movement. You grow up to be constantly aware of the changes in the air and sea. High tide? Check the moorings. Heavy snowfall? Shovel snow off the boats.

Ole grew up knowing nature doesn‘t sit still. You cannot control her or fix her in place. The only way to manage her powers is to move along her tracks. Like sailors do. Lyngør has seen many sailors go out to sea, and have seen most of them come back. Ole‘s great grandfather did not.

A couple of years ago Ole circumnavigated the Atlantic Ocean in a 120 year old pilot cutter.

It was mostly about the adventure and to some extent to put him to the test. But Ole has now followed in the wake of his forefathers.

The experience did not necessarily mark the beginning of something, i.e. manhood, but rather a return to what he was all along, a kind of homecoming.

The very permanence of form is only an outline of movement.

Henri Bergson Brodersen‘s photographs are site specific. He works in the area that surrounds Lyngør, a huge archipelago of islands and rock formations,

included in the Skjærgårdsparken National Park. The park was constituted in the 70s by the socialist government of the era. The land was expropriated from its owners and is now owned and maintained by the state. The park, with its islands and sounds, equals the size of Denmark. Ole is very proud of this park that allows for this area to remain in its original state. The Norwegian word “Skjærgård”, with the nearest suitable English word “skerries”, is a characteristic feature for Fennoscandia (and Scotland), and was shaped by glaciers that once covered these lands.

Preparing for his recordings, Ole collects various materials such as: Styrofoam, pieces of sailcloth and rope, out of which he makes objects (of different complexity) that will populate the landscape. Most of the material is found while rummaging through his grandfathers shed or his father‘s sail loft. Out of these Ole fashions markers; i.e. floats, flags and kites, sometimes with attached additional sparklers, LED-lights or other light sources. They help trace their trajectory through the landscape.

A large format camera is used and often with long exposures that allows him to capture the movements of his markers. Ole always brings multiple markers with him. Waves, tide, wind and currents decide where the photograph will be taken. At a suitable location, before composing, Ole always test-runs a few of the markers, to get a feel for the pathway of the forces. Afterwards, he has no influence on the final exposure. He deploys his markers, starts the chosen exposure and waits as it develops in front of him while nature takes control of the markers.

Photography reveals an invisible figure of movement in every landscape. Something that is unnoticed, rather than undetectable. A useful analogy is false-color, a technique used in deep space imaging to visualize different unobservable phenomena. Images taken by telescopes are often in wavelengths invisible to the human eye and needs to be mapped into our perceptual range. We know that these astronomical phenomena aren‘t presented the way they actually look; otherwise they would remain undetected by us.

The titles for Ole Brodersen‘s photographs read as a list of ingredients used to create the markers. You can say the titles are in the photograph, rather than underneath them. Their function is to demystify, rather than to comment.

It is not his wish for the observer to spend time solving riddles. In addition, he wants to underline the importance of the coincidences that occur during the process, how unpredicted events and using what he finds along the way leaves a mark on the final image.

The figure of movement that appears represents a set characteristic of a given landscape. It is a result of the weather conditions on that particular day, but also of the materials being used. The entire procedure enables nature to yield a figure of movement. An invisible force is captured into a visible sign. www.olebrodersen.com post@olebrodersen.com

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Issue 01

Janne Amalie Svit / Image Troopers Pagan Poetry: Growing up in the country, nature has always been close. At my doorstep there was always a possibility for an adventure in the nearby woods or fields. As a child I always found nature both scary and magical. Nature still gives me an intense sense of being alive, of being close to an inner beast if you like.

“On the surface simplicity But the darkest pit in me It’s Pagan poetry Pagan poetry”

Björk

I love nature, but I often keep my distance. I like looking at it from afar. Maybe because I can’t control it? I prefer gardening and bouquets of flowers to cross country skiing or hiking in the mountains. I guess you could call my relationship with nature ambiguous and my series Pagan Poetry somehow tries to describe this ambiguous relationship. You could say that the images are self portraits.

The titles are a homage to the artist Bjork who, since her debut album, has been a huge inspiration to me. Bjork’s universe inspires me, it is unconventional, beautiful, magical and often speaks of human behavior. www.imagetroopers.com post@imagetroopers.com

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Inga Björk Fear has no name If something is blurry it seems to scare us. If we can´t really see, we react emotionally and various preconceptions and prejudices surface. Our history is often filled with stories of the dreadfull ”others” and the stories tell us to be afraid of the unknown.

When I started to shoot pictures for what became this project, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to show our emotions of fear by staging pictures of the supernatural. I worked intuitively for a long time, using ideas that popped up in my mind. These ideas were built on my childhood fairy tales, the horror movies that I had come across, books of magic realism and my ancestor’s fear of the supernatural. Sometimes I saw my pictures as a cross over that began www.ucsscandinavia.com

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to reflect the insane and the project became personal in another way, as I grew up with a mother that was bipolar.

myself questions like what will happen to the supernatural creatures of yesterday in the world of today?

After two years I now start to think I know what I’m doing. This is like subjects I have been interested in before. This project as projects before this is questioning the normative.

Sometimes I took pictures of one thing and afterwards realised I had taken pictures of something else.

What is outside the box? What doesn´t fit in, scares us, and why?

I have tried to explore the supernatural in the form of old mythes and stories about places close to where I used to live. I went to places were I was scared as a child. I used media norms and turned them upside down. I asked

What it really comes down to is, that I’m interested in finding out why so many of us are afraid of this ”others”, as in people or in the unknown and unexplained. inga.bjork@glesbygdsbor.se www.glesbygdsbor.se

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Merete Haseth / Image Troopers The Sleepwalkers Chronicles These photographs are part of a new series called The Sleepwalkers chronicles.

They try to depict a certain state or a mood of the inhabitants in an imagined country.

For decades these individuals have been searching for a meaning. They are deprived of a true life and the only thing they do is to work, which is the only thing of value to the government. There is no place for individualism; the togetherness of the community is the law.

Spare time is only for kids and the adults work all week from morning to night. The suicide rate is high and there are posters in tube stations telling you what number to call if you see someone fall onto the rails. In the north of the country, there is even a forest where people can go to kill themselves.

The individuals of this country live a depressing life, exploited by their government.

I try to depict the mood of the individuals living in this country.

These series are inspired by Japan and the writings of Haruki Murakami. www.imagetroopers.com post@imagetroopers.com

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Magdalena Kotkowska “The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden.

If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.”

Thomas More, Utopia

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THE GARDENS For several years, I have been returning in the winters to the city where I was born, to take photos of the Gardens. 70 years ago, before the Yalta conference, Wroclaw was the German city of Breslau. Only once in our European history has it happened that millions of people, both German and Polish have been expelled from one place to another; a story of displacement of whole populations resulting in losing one territory and trying to make a new life in another.

This plots of ground are stories of the people and theirs paths. The outlines of houses, fences, pavilions, objects both lost and found... all this mysterious manifestations of human activity swirling in the space of nature. Those spaces has a pattern of movement and act, as if it is made by and for artist and viewer in one person.

Such places, even when lying unused and dormant, reveal their dependency on a cultivator, a concrete figure responsible for its upkeep and beauty,na gardener guarding and caring for his‚ territory’.

The Gardens are now vast green areas in the city that previously, before the war, were used for residential purposes. The post-communist proletariat, often poor, excluded and homeless, for whom it is their only ownership, use these places today. The gardens are, according to the philosopher Michael Foucault, one of the oldest existing heterotopian areas in continuous transformation. It is a the world in miniature and a space of simulated paradise, that primarily engender the occupants with a feeling of being in a private territory, a place of freedom, a place for otherness where personal meaning can be introduced.

This allotments are separated from the rest of any townscape designated for the use of man.

Despite its obvious autonomy and anarchy, gardens have their statutes and regulations, often manifested on a sign at each entrance where one can read; The existence and development of family allotments is a deliberate and planned policy of the State to meet the needs of the general population. or

Meeting positive roles in urban planning and the ecosystem of cities and municipalities, family allotments are green areas set aside in accordance with an Act of the Council, the function of which is to restore such uncultivated land to the community by protecting a natural habitat and to create a healthy human environment and positively shape ecological conditions for mankind in urban living.

Walking between hoardings, I discovered that people still have a primeval desire to get in touch with the land and experience the cycles of nature. An astonishing interplay between man and nature where from the chaos of the universe, a rebirth takes place in order to once again disperse and escape. The structures once built by gardeners, seem to echo the past, like ruins of an abandoned civilization. Uninhabited, empty, nonhistorical, with plastic bottles and old German bricks dug out of the ground. Bare branches and forgotten artefacts all around patiently waiting for a rebirth. makot21@gmail.com

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Issue 01

Ingvild Melberg Eikeland Of birds and men Through forests, fields and along the seashore, I followed them in their paths as the birds were returning north after the winter. They hung up their nets, adjusted their binoculars, put up their tripods, and directed their eyes to the sky.

Then we waited. ingvild-melbergeikeland.squarespace.com ingvildmelberg@outlook.com

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Uncertain States Scandinavia is a non-profit lens based artist collective who are passionate in creating, discussing and promoting photography. In this volatile global climate the work reflects some of our current concerns and challenges how perception is formed in our society on issues as diverse as politics, religions and personal identity.

For your on-line copy, visit www.ucsscandinavia.com Subscribe to the newspaper at info@ucsscandinavia.com Follow us on Instagram: ucsscandinavia Uncertain States Scandinavia DA NO 916337027 Edited by Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød, Tor S Ulstein and Charlie Fjätström. Designed By James Young. Printed By Amedia Trykk og Distribusjon.

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