YOUNG DANISH PHOTOGRAPHY ’07

CASPER BALSLEV
METTE BERSANG
MIE RIIS CHRISTIANSEN
LOUISE BØGELUND SAUGMANN
JACOB VINAMATA JESSEN

21. APRIL - 3. JUNE 2007

Fotografisk Center is proud to present Young Danish Photography ‘07, the eighth in a series of book publications and exhibitions that Fotografisk Center has produced since 1998.
The aim of this show and book is to present, promote and market the work of a younger generation of artists. It is not the primary aim to focus just on newer tendencies in photography, but rather to create a qualitative forum for young photographers.
Caper Balslev (1978) One autumn day somewhere in New Orleans he sets up his medium format camera. The month of august and the aftermath of hurricane Kathrina saw the worst catastrophe yet to hit New Orleans. Many of the city’s inhabitants were to be found in the large stadium, which more or less was beginning to look like a prison. The Danish photographer’s project is not journalistic or sensationalist, it’s more the mood and silence of the city that Casper Balslev wants to portray. The city’s transformation into a heavy, wet and otherworldly existence. The project is documentary though also very poetic.

Mette Bersang & Louise Bøgelund Saugmann (1977 & 1973) are both from The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, England. Their series ‘Blurred Drawings’ focuses on Danish Primary schools. Here there are schools but no children. Heavy set furniture that is pushed around on a daily basis, but no sound. This duo creates a quiet insight into the Primary School aesthetic and the way objects are organised.
One can sense an accidental and overwhelming poetry at play here, from the placement of the maps in the plastic bucket to the ubiquitous boards and the foxes head above this both organisation and disorganisation. A type of inner ‘terrain vague’ where crossover areas are moved indoors.

Mie Riis Christiansen (1982) is from Danmarks Designskole. She is quite imaginative in her staging of women figures. The pictures are colour saturated and surprising in an ordinary, but strangely constructed universe.
There is something odd or amiss in these pictures where the woman is turned away from the camera. She explains it thus in her introduction: ‘a part of a work in progress where woman and space create a narrative about a seeming ordinariness./ The pictures exist in the space between on the one side, the foreseeable and the recognisable and on the other side, a constructed play that mistakenly looks like reality.

Jacob Vinamata Jessen (1976) is from the Royal Danish Art Academy and has chosen to create a conceptual installation. ‘ A glass lamp is destroyed and photographed at the moment of destruction’ he writes and continues, ‘ the lamp is then glued back together and hangs in a room where it illuminates the photograph of it’s own destruction. The photograph of the lamp’s destruction is not possible without light from the lamp’.

Ung dansk Fotografi ´07 is arranged in co-operation with Anna Louisa Boysen, Fotografisk Center, and has received support from Kunstrådets fagudvalg for Billedkunst / Kunststyrelsen.

Ung dansk Fotografi ´07 48 pages, illustrated, Published by Fotografisk Center, ISBN 87-90362-37-3, price kr. 100.-

'Jackies Drøm' ©Mie Riis Christiansen

'Uden titel' ©Jacob Vinamata Jessen

bergsang og saugmann - Utydelige Tegning nr.5