This homepage was launched in August 2018, well before my 10th anniversary as art photographer in May 2019.
It’s also related to having been invited by the European Cultural Centre to participate in its international exhibition, “Personal Structures. Open Borders” at Palazzo Mora in Venice in the context of the Venice Biennale, May 11-November 24, 2019.
It will be a large photo-based, multimedia installation that you can read about in the SPAR menu.
The idea behind this homepage
Most photography homepages offer a background to the photographer and present her or his portfolio. This homepage – online exhibition – is different.
It’s true that a good photograph should speak for itself and a picture can say more than a thousand words.
However, gallery and museums catalogues, art publications and videos are constantly produced to give interested audiences a helping hand in understanding better what there is and what is behind – to even feel that they know the artist a bit.
So, why not homepages too? I believe that the image with texts – both/and – is simply better than either/or. It creates a dialogue, like it would be if you visited my studio.
As visitor here, you’re invited to comment on the articles and under the single works. I would be grateful to have your questions and your views about anything you see and feel here in my online home.
Quick menu & navigation guide
Start out with the “Portfolio” and/ or “Journal” menus and you’re guided through the gallery.
The “Portfolios”
– contain the background, “story” and selected photos theme-by-theme! Read it quickly and you’ll understand my works much better. Each also has a gallery/slider where you can enlarge each photo. From each Portfolio you may go straight to the Shop where you’ll find more works.
The “Journal”
– contains articles about my prints, exhibitions, projects, ideas, processes and works in progress, etc.
The “Blog”
– is external and there I write, from August 2018, nothing about myself but only about other artists, their works, art fairs, art books etc. – things that I love to share with you as an art recommender, not an art critic.
The “Print Info & FAQ”
– tells you all you ever wanted to know about print processes, formats, media, authenticity, edition runs, numbering, signature and forwarding to you – one big guarantee for you that you get something absolutely special when you make a purchase.
The “Shop”
– is organized to mirror the Portfolios, offering detailed info and ways to choose formats etc., each image can be enlarged and searched in details. You can comment and rate the works. You’ll know everything before you put in the card and go to check out and pay.
Art photographics and documentary: Creating a reality and not just a representation
Most of what I do is art photographics and experiment with motives, processes, mixed media, papers, printing processes… I deliberately seek diversity and eclecticism. If you can see something of me in it all, that’s fine but I don’t consciously seek to develop one style or belong to any “school”.
I get scared at the risk of ending up repeating myself.
Experimental is one word of relevance. Another is exploratory.
To me that is about two things: Exploring the world around us but also, when I’ve taken a picture exploring what is in it that I did not see at first, what is its potential – what can it become?
How to crop? Should it be colours or black and white or something third? Should I use some filter, digital brushes? Blur it? What medium does it deserve to be printed on? I see the camera and PhotoShop the way I guess a painter sees the brush: It’s a tool to create something which is a reality in and of it self and not necessarly – or at all – a representation of the world around us.
Photography is an art form and it is not longer a criterium that it represents well reality – unless you do documentary work. It creates a reality and sometimes quite far away from the original shot.
Thus, I never believed that a picture taken by a camera is a static thing; rather, it’s a point of departure for something you don’t know about when you took it and when you set out to “do something” with it.
Restless exploration suits me fine and there is more about that under “About Oberg” for instance also why I call it photographics and not photography and how growing up with art has been my only education.
Now and then I also do documentary photography. That may happen, for instance, when my “other life” as peace researcher takes me to a particular place where I experience something rather unique. Like in Syria in 2016. Some of the results will be documentary, some may turn out to change in the process and become more artistic (whatever that means).
But I am not a war photographer at all, there is more than enough violence and photos of violence in our world.
If anything, I am a peace photographer and it’s worth a thought that neither you nor I, I assume, know what that is?
