Øistein Sæthren Dahle: “I started taking pictures for the project in 2009, at a time when I was beginning a relationship and my best friend had died in a rock climbing accident. The contrast between these two events marked the work’s process. I have used elements from my experiences to create a story laden with sexual energy and conflicted emotion. The photographs are made between 2009 and 2017, and in a natural way they have been made on the places I have been connected to.
Time has been my most important tool to express and talk about love, loss, all the things that got lost and all the things I have got.
The project consists of portraits, landscapes, poems, notes, contact prints, hand drawn flourishes and annotations. The portraits features young people from my own life, often in the nude; friends, loved ones and self-portraits. There are both staged photographs and snapshots. I use them to reveal the vulnerability within myself and in others. Simultaneously, I want them to express dignity and raise questions about life in general. The photographs also poses questions about representation of intimacy and modes of looking in staged portraiture, which can also be connected to reflections on photography as a medium.The landscapes are not conventional documentary images. They are meant to express memories and emotions. For me, it is exciting to see the ways elements in a landscape refer to inner feelings, and it is interesting to see how the landscapes affect the other material in the book and vice versa. The notes and sketches document my working process and create a link between the active photographing and the editing that happens afterward. I also see them as an expression of the insufficiency of photography, representing my ongoing desire to make photographs more complex.”
The project will be published in book format by Kodoji Press.
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