Assentorp Camping

The last couple of weeks I’ve tried to dedicate one day every week to go shoot. My thought was to get out of town and get to spend some time shooting my large format camera.

I started cruising around the area where I lived as a teenager and ended up at the local camping site. The season is just about to begin. By coincidence the first day I was there new owners where taking overof the site. They have big plans for changes on the sites, so it will be exciting to follow how the place will change during the summer.

This is a selection of drafts from my first couple of days on the site. I will definitely be going back to do some more photography. And spending time outside of the city, enjoying the calm and quite atmosphere of the site is just amazing.

Vedde Station

This is the train station in the little rural town where I grew up in. I was always late in the morning, so to make it to school, I had to run like crazy to make the train. The problem was that, to make the train stop, you need to be at the station before the train arrives to push a button that signal the train driver to make the train stop, otherwise the train just blasted through the station. Usually there would be other passengers that had pushed the button, but there was no guarantees. Therefore I developed a strategy where I ran the last part of the way to the station right next to the rail tracks, so the driver could see me running so he would know he had to stop. It actually worked. Sometimes. And sometimes it didn’t, depending on the drivers mood I guess.

Growing up the local train was a life line for us teenagers. Every day I spent hours in the train. back and fourth to school and usually back and fourth to the skatepark that was forty minutes away. I still remember the smell of stepping into the fogged smokers cabin in the morning. Every morning we had the same rutine. A packed train and the same employees checking our tickets. Over time I got to know many of the employees. On numerous occasions they had to wake me up when I was riding home from a party — and sometimes I even got to ride along with the driver in the cockpit.

Refuge

This spot is one of my favorite places around Copenhagen. Placed in Kalvebod Fælled, which is a huge common right next to Copenhagen. Kalvebod Fælled is a dammed area, it is completely flat, just a vast plain. My spot is at the edge of Pinseskoven. Which is actually the biggest birch forrest in Denmark. Birds carried seeds from Sweden and created this beautiful forrest right next to Copenhagen – I’ve always loved birch trees.

I’ve camped here, at this particular spot, numerous times. What keeps drawing me to this place is the view. You have this marvellous view of the plain which lets your eyes stretch. And when it gets dark you can see the impressive Ørestaden city lights in the distance. Living in Copenhagen often feels like being in maze of red brick buildings. I’m fortunate to live on the fifth floor and from there I have have proper view of what seems to be the horizon. Off course the stairs are a daily nightmare! But before I moved up to the fifth floor, I often felt that there could pass many days where I didn’t have the opportunity to let my eyes have a rest on a distant view. The distant gaze is important to me, it feels like the visual equivalent to filling your lungs with fresh air. It has this dreamy feeling of freedom, the possibility to go anywhere. Like when you look at the ocean and get the feeling that you are somehow connected to the whole world. When I was a kid my grandparents sometimes visited from Westman Islands. Living in the Westmans Islands my grandfather had seen the ocean every single day of his life. So he went crazy by the mere thought of not being able to see the ocean. We had to go, for a family trip, every single day to have a look the ocean when he was around. That has always made a big impression on me, so to look at the ocean has always been special to me.   

This is a picture of the traces from one of my camps. I always try to keep the traces as minimal as possible. I only make open fires in dedicated spots or keep them contained so they don’t damage the vegetation.

These pictures were taken during the first covid lockdown. I was all set up for a peaceful night in the tent. At about 11pm I had just settled in my tent with my book and my thoughts, when I heard a pounding beat followed by a crowd shouting. A freaking rave was going on just 300 meters from my camp and the DJ was terrible. Playing ridiculous music. Ravers where trickling from the woods everywhere and accumulated to a crowd of 100+ people. It pretty much felt like being part of a cartoon, to be lying in a tent trying to read while there was a rave going on a stonethrow away. But eventually I fell asleep and woke up the next morning to the sound of the rave. They continued until 10am and then turned of the music. I walked over and had a look, people where happy to have stolen this chance to have a party in the middle of nowhere in these constrictive times.

Tom pt. I

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This is the first part of a series I will do about Tom. I’ve followed Tom for some years now and I’ve accumulated quite a few pictures and small series that I will try to put together here.

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I first met Tom in August 2016. The top picture is the first portrait I ever took of him. Tom told me that he had a fight with his girlfriend a few days earlier. He told me that, during the spectacle, she had pushed him out of her bed so he broke his arm in the process — nobody knows what really happened. When I met him he was on his way to the hospital to get his arm checked, he had been meaning to go since the incident. I offered to follow him to the emergency room but he refused to go right away, he would rather wait a few hours. Tom said he didn't like hospitals and that he wanted to grab a bite first. I doubt that he ever got arm checked. As it shows in the picture his arm is in a pretty bad state, all crooked, swollen and bruised. But Tom was very calm about it. Tom is always very calm about things that would freak out anybody. 

Now I've met and visited Tom on multiple occasions. What strikes me is that he always has these terrible injuries and that his relationships is a constant turmoil. Yet he is always so calm. The second time I ran into Tom was a month or so after I first saw him, he and his special ladyfriend Elisa was napping in a small park in the neighbourhood. The spectacle was long forgotten and Tom was his mild self as usual. Tom and Elisa was a couple for a few months, but Tom is a ladies man so to be honest it’s hard to keep track of his relationships.

Tom has struggled with drug abuse most of his life. Because of the drugs he’s never really experienced a real life, doing real things. Tom grew up in different orphanages. He was taken from home because of his violent stepmother and abusive father. He told me how he was completely neglected by the people who where supposed to take care him. I guess this is a tragic but unfortunately far from singular story.

Notes from underground

I’ve been wanting to do this scribble about my darkroom for a long time, it’s been sitting there at the back of my head for months now, so thought I’d have a go at it.

Since I went back to shooting film some years ago my goal has always been to establish a full circle analogue workflow. Of course that required setting up a darkroom to make prints. I mainly shoot color, so I would have to make myself a darkroom that could handle both Color and bnw for it to make any sense. Since studying photography I’ve always dreamt of having my own real color darkroom and not just an enlarger in a closet.

When I first started taking pictures, color darkrooms where very common. Most photographers had a small darkroom for color prints in the back of their studio. I even had a tiny setup in my dorm bathroom, when I was about 19, making colorprints processed in Jobo drums. Back then nobody seemed to process their own color film. I was always told it was to difficult to master properly and it was dirt cheap to get a lab to do it. Today it’s the complete opposite — nobody does prints anymore, but it seems like everybody is doing c-41 processing i their kitchen sink. But doing color printing is actually not very complicated to do, I just think that most analogue enthusiasts think it’s an insurmountable task because there aren’t many sources of information available on blogs and YouTube. Therefore scanning seems like the only choice there is.

Anyone who shoots film will know that the process of scanning can be a frustrating and time consuming task. There simply isn’t any really satisfying solution — the technology of digitizing film has been more or less stagnant for more than a decade. The obvious thing to do is of course to choose an even more labour intensive process, the darkroom.

My main goal shooting film has always been to bypass the computer, more specific bypass any screen. For me the satisfaction of shooting film is of course the look of film, but it is just as much the handling of something physical. It is tactile. Mastering the analogue process is certainly a craft. And the analogue process is not an abstract process — it’s a mechanical, physical and chemical process unlike the digital process which is, for me anyways, a complete abstraction.

To me there lies a great satisfaction in seeing my photography printed. For many years now it has been standard to view and appreciate photography on screens that are, of course, being backlit. Very few acknowledges that it changes the images and the way we view them. Also, viewing content on screens, especially phones, makes me impatient — it tells my brain to speed up, want more, in order to be entertained. Therefore I really cherish printed work, that being either books or prints. And when you print an image and hang it on the wall or on the fridge it becomes a part of your living space and not just something that is stuffed away on a hard drive or a SoMe feed.

Being exposed to excessive amounts of photographs every day I have to ask myself why and how do I want to produce even more photographs? Being process driven I personally often seem to migrate toward labour intensive ways of doing things. For 12 years I shared a wooden boat with some friends, I ride italian vintage bicycles, and if I owned a car it would definitely be an old Saab.

The Underground

It all started last summer when I managed to print at a friends darkroom. He was kind enough to open his newly finished brilliant darkroom north of Copenhagen to me. Even though he was doing bnw printing and processing large format paper negatives only, he also had a small color enlarger. So I bought a Jobo drum on Ebay, my old ones where all lost, some chemistry and paper to give color printing a go. I was all set for colorprinting. I managed to do a handfull of prints but since I hadn’t done any printing for fifteen years and I only spend two days at it, they didn't quite match up to what I was going for.

Then, by chance, a couple of weeks later I got offered to buy a bulk of darkroom equipment including a Durst 1200 and a small tabletop paper processor. The timing was nothing but perfect. At that time a good friend and I, who unfortunately no longer share the space with me, had been planning to start an office like workspace. We wanted to process some film, scan negatives and maybe even do some small scale bnw printing. We had a room available in a basement in Copenhagen, so we just decided to go all in on building a darkroom and making the workspace a computer free zone. Who needs an office anyway?

With all the equipment I had just acquired we where all set and ready to go. I had never dreamed of having a well equipped darkroom up running this fast.

Now I had all the basic equipment needed for printing. The room just needed a bit of cleaning, some light sealing done and lastly installation of a water heater for hot water. Everything went pretty smoothly until we started the machines. The power supply went up in smoke on both our color enlargers almost immediately. I was devastated — patience has never been my strong suit. But there where solutions even though it took some time. When I finally got the enlargers up and running, with much appreciated help from Cph Silverlab, I found out that the real challenge was going to be the processing machine.

Processing machines are a hassle — they are cumbersome 90’s tech machines with too many gears and rollers that need heavy maintenance. So when I started up the machine it was dirty. Unfortunately that resulted in stains and scratches on the prints. It needed thorough cleaning — days of cleaning. It had been kept away unused for years so it needed a big overhaul. But after a few days I finally managed to get clean and scratch free prints. This is the first colorprint that I printed — shot in Ängelholm in Sweden.

I also quickly realised that running a print processor is somewhat like having a tamagotchi or a pet. It needs your attention all the time. If it’s not turned on every other day the chemistry goes bad and you are left with stains or scratches on your prints — again. It needs thorough cleaning all the time. But besides that the machine is an absolute bliss to work with.

After getting a proper workflow up and running I wanted to avoid scanning for some time. Therefore most of my work from 2018 and 19 has never been scanned. I found that the completely analogue workflow felt pretty natural almost immediately. When I’ve processed my films I make contactsheets just like in the old days. It really feels good to be able to make real color contactsheets again — they are mesmerising to look at. For me contactsheets are by far the best way to keep track of my images. I highly appreciate having a physical record of my work, it helps me to maintain a proper overview.

Somehow it all made perfect sense, as I quickly realized that the materials where designed for this workflow. Film was simply not designed for digitizing.

I quickly got into the old routine of printing. It was a nice experience to see how fast I adopted my old ways of doing things. And the joy of looking at real photographic prints every day is great. As you get used to wetlab prints you begin to clearly see and feel the difference from digital prints. What strikes me the most about C-prints is of course the quality of the prints. C-prints has another look to them. The difference between C-prints and pigment prints is somehow comparable with the difference between digital photos and digitised film photos. By that I mean that they render colors differently — not better just different. Pigment prints are definitely sharper and do often have more clarity but do also look more artificial to my eye. They also have a different feel when you touch them, it simply feels better to touch and handle the wetlab prints. And because the image is produced by layers of emulsion rather than pigment ink that is drawn onto the paper, C-prints has much more depth than pigment prints.

But to be honest I find discussing one over the other kind of futile — just like its pointless trying to argue how digital is better than analogue or the other way around. They are different tools for different purposes and it’s all about doing what one enjoy. Having had the privilege to work in the darkroom for more than a year now, I am convinced that it is a lot of work, hassle and sometimes frustration. But I absolutely love the process and the satisfaction of producing real photographs that leave no digital footprint.

Thank you for reading!

Rome II

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I'm back with another gallery from Rome. I spent six days in Rome and when I was there I was really frustrated about not having enough time to shoot on the street. But that is nothing out of the ordinary, I think it's hard for me to shrug off that feeling. When we where about to go home I had shot about 22 rolls of film, which is not bad at all for me.

Walking around in any city I always take pictures of mostly everything, it's a bit of a compulsive behaviour. But I feel it is such a privilige to take pictures of nothing. To me it's liberating to just shoot by intuition and allow one self to be drawn by the weird details of the city. To me photography can contain the same mystic as much poetry does. It can initially seem like the picture is rejecting meaning. I then always somehow feel the urge to figure out some deeper meaning or secret code. But some pictures are just pleasing to look at and some of the most interesting pictures doesn't require to be figured out it's not about meaning at all, it's much more simple than that. It's solely a question about how you feel about it. Do you like it or not, basically, for me it's as simple as that.

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Some of my most boring photographs are actually the ones that I tend to cherish most over time. I just enjoy looking at them again and again. They are not a representation of meaning but a bouquet of connotations, as Roland Barthes coined it. So instead of conveying meaning and intend some photographs allows the viewer to figure out and create a personal meaning and feel about the work. When we look at photographs we all have different experiences that we draw upon that define our feelings about certain pictures. But it's important to look at pictures with a certain attention and openness to be able to feel anything. 

The structure of most social media platforms inherently works against facilitating this kind of presence when appreciating work. The gamification of viewing and sharing content has, for me, resulted in a sort of blase where my attentionspan is being reduced to split seconds. I don't know how many times I have scrolled through absolutely fantastic work and granted it less than a second of attention. To me it's very frustrating to experience this kind of pacification by not being able to pay the attention that the work deserves. It's as if the saturation point has been met and massive quantity is no longer satisfying for my part anyway. I don't want to get bores with a massive amount of content, I wan't to be able to get inspired by granting boring work attention.   

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Rome - MMXVIII

I recently went on a small trip to Rome. I had more or less just gotten back from a four week trip to Iceland. This much travelling is actually quite unusual for me, given that I've lived on a student income for years. Living in Scandinavia it’s always preferable to go for a little trip in march or april to get a head start on the spring. And even though the early spring weather in Iceland was exceptionally mild this year, I wouldn't call it a head start on anything other than the bright evenings in the north. 

There is a certain rhythm when you shoot in Denmark or Iceland, the lighting of the seasons can seem a bit extreme. We have severely dark winters, where you don't see the sun for weeks and bright summers where - especially in Iceland - the sun barely sets. 

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When in Rome I had to get used to shooting in bright sunlight again, the shift surprises me every year. I spend months getting used to the soft overcast light with no shadows. Suddenly the light shifts and I need to work with harsh shadows and bright highlights. When I shoot using ambient light I prefer the overcast weather, where the sky is actually a huge soft box, it creates a kind of melancholy vibe that I appreciate. But shooting with flash the bright sunlight is fantastic for creating an intense contrast and dramatic shadows. It also has the advantage that it camouflages the flash light, so it seems more subtle than it will if you flash at night.

I always love to experience a city for the first time and Rome was particularly exiting. The city of Rome feels much like one huge museum. Everywhere you turn there is an old ruin or something historical. And the density of turists is quite overwhelming. When I visit a city i'm not interested in searching for whatever conception of authenticity that might belong to that city. I'm mostly interested in the things I see, and I pretty much follow my intuition on what I gravitate towards. That's why I detest planning and structured tours, I'm much more interested in just wandering aimlessly.

I never know what I will end up shooting, so I usually carry around way to much equipment. I tend to lug around three cameras at all times. A medium format camera, one slr for shooting with flash and a rangefinder for more discrete shooting. One of my own biggest misconceptions about going back to strictly shooting film has been that I would focus less on gear. It has turned out to be the exact opposite for me! 

In the gallery below I've gathered a some of my flash shots from Rome. 

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the Blog

So this is my first blogpost on my current website. As stated in the blogs caption I have no plan for where this is headed only thoughts. For some time now, photos have been piling up quite rapidly. These photos are either individual, random shots or small series that I for some reason like or feel attached to. Being that most of my social media presence has been focussed around a sometimes narrow and specific style of street photography I have long felt the need to establish a channel for publishing content that just isn't fit for feeding the beast of social media. That said, I will be consolidating some of my street work that has been published on other channels, but eventually I hope to publish selections of my work in their entirety here first. 

Most social media platforms are pretty content specific, they encourage users to produce a particular kind of content within the genre or style the user is working. As both a content consumer and producer I have long been left with an unsatisfying feeling that quantity has completely taken over. It has become a numbers game - where I'm left with such a short attentionspan that it's hard to even get inspired. I don't have the patience to grant the work that's presented to me the attention that it really deserves. I will therefore look to including my thoughts on photography books, literature, art, photographers and other random things that inspire me. 

This scribble was by no means ment to be a manifesto but it seems to be what's on my mind.