So for my writing the essay class i choose the artist JH Engstrom to write my paper about. I dont know how many of you know of him but he is a relatively young swedish photographer, who was featured in the spring edition of aperture. I was lucky enough to interview him last week and he had some really interesting things to say, and i thought i might share a couple of them with you. When i asked him about his process he simply said that time is the most important aspect of his process, and that he simply spends time with his images. When he needs to choose for a book or a show, he looks through his contact sheets and chooses images that he likes solely on intuition, "I don't even look to see if it is a good picture, like if there are scratches." This statement reminded me of Zen in the Art of Archery, and the idea of the "artless art." The master tells the student,
"You do not wait for fullfillment, but brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independendntly of you,"
I feel that this is apparent to the viewer when seeing his images. Many do have dots of dusts and scratches, but the overwhelming feeling from the images seems to outweigh the technical flaws.
Another interesting quote from the interview,
A lot of people see my books as kind of sad, but I don't see it that way, i definitely don't see it that way. That they are kind of depressing, you know, what i show, but i don't think so . I like what i show, i like what's in the photographs, even if its sometimes something that looks kind of depressing, it exists in the world, and it exists in much worse things than what i show. I kind of embrace it, without making it romantic, but it exists in this world, and i think that to me that is not ugly.
Take a look at some of his work here, and see if you get the same sad and depressing feelings others get when viewing his work.
And the last quote i will leave you with from Engstrom is,
I think when i photograph, or since i am a photographer, I don't think i look better at the world than other people, but I think I might look more concentrated, focused, and think about what I see.
Anyway i hope you enjoyed my rant, but if any of you are interested in hearing the whole interview just let me know, he did have quite a few interesting ideas.