Over many years, I have made photo-works in the Nordics.  This goes back to when I first started to work with photography as a teenager, and when we used to spend time in Norway with my mother’s family. (See: Vannkanten, 1984; fig. 1) As a half-Norwegian, I am innately drawn to the lands, languages and cultures of Scandinavia, and this can be found in much of my work.  A mixed identity is a further innate element in my practice; a duality that is often an implicit or an explicit mandate in my work, and always an inherent ontology in my medium of choice: photography.  My camera mediates these terrains – the terrain of a place, the terrain of an identity and the terrain of photography itself, although never fully cap/able to consolidate them.  Instead, the photographs are material grounds for the playing out or performing of initial and subsequent momentary existential observations: by me, of me; by you of me; and sometimes by you, of you.  (See: installation from Camberwell Space Projects, Camberwell College of Arts UAL Photography Research, November 29 - December 16, 2016; fig. 2)

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This idea connects to a lived experience of artist or audience, in the time and space of the image or its ensuing presentation/ dissemination: a kind of “I was here, and I did this…” for all parties (including the camera). (See: ‘Here Goes’ for my First Ever Polaroid, c1980; fig. 3) I have recently come to see this as a kind of meta-status, in and of itself; a practice of photography, where photography reveals something of itself, that is otherwise hidden or transparent and snatched by the referent of the image. Photographs are metaphors, they are not the thing itself; the making of a meta-photography (or in another iteration, a metaphor-tography) is to resist this idea, in the attempt that the photograph is or becomes the thing itself, as its imperative (see Study in Meta-Photography, Düsseldorf, 2020 (with earlier (2015) study on screen);fig.4).  This imperative is also seen in the photo-works of directed images where events are performed to an observing camera to become entangled and inextricable to the photographic (outcome). I have always been interested in the relationship between photography and performance as another form of duality. Unlike the other forms suggested above, this duality is conceivably easier to consolidate. The notion that the performance and photograph become united, is the collapsing of a superposition. 

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I recently completed a practice-based PhD titled: Photographic Practice and the Status of Superposition: Image, Observation, Event, in which I develop a new way of thinking about photography, and that brought together some older works with new ones.  This exploration continues to impact on the work I am making now, in all the ways that I have outlined above – with my most recent work titled Interference Pattern, 2024, that is effectively repeated bands of light and dark, as a (quantum) articulation of a superposition. Here I am in Finland, skiing across the photograph in alternate states of dress in white suit, black suit. (See Interference Pattern, 2024 (detail; work in progress/ study); fig.5)

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There is a plan to present a selection of work in a solo show early next year in Savonlinna, Finland, at Villa Suruton (www.villasuruton.fi) tentatively titled Quantum Leap – but that’s still in the future!

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