Worried Landscapes 2012-
Worried Landscapes is a series of landscape photographs from Hordaland, Norway. In my motifs I depict the mental impressions and moods of the Westland landscape, inspired by the composition and color palette of the painters Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928) and Bernt Tunold (1877-1946), as well as the photographer Anders Beer Wilse (1865-1949). I am interested in the impact the landscape has on the viewer and those who live there, and what demography, urbanization and climate change do to the Norwegian sense of identity. Norwegian nature has a strong place in the national feeling and my photos show that it is not what it once was. Nevertheless, I see that the artificial presence of lampposts, roads and massive power pylons becomes a part of the landscape. Perhaps we need to expand the concepts of what nature is, since access to electricity and distant cultures are also a natural part of our lives now. I ask myself if the Norwegian landscape have room for its inhabitants? And I choose to believe what I see. As a documentary photographer, it is challenging to create compositions when you are dependent on wind and weather. It requires immediate and intuitive reactions to the capricious climate, and an acceptance that today's landscape is not as untouched as it was a hundred years ago. This then becomes a subjective documentation of how the landscape look today. In a hundred years from now it will most likely be unrecognizable.