About this site
“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”
— Ralph Hattersley
Photography as a Way of Life
There is something quite extraordinary about good photographs. I can’t really put my finger on it, but as an container for emotions or moods, in my book, photography is unrivalled. Photography, I think, capture moments or fleeting passages in life that are otherwise left unnoticed. By distilling and refining these moments, we might get a richer life.
Paradoxically, however, these moments have to be experienced with a certain degree of naivety.
The Joy of Engaging in Naive Notions
In our world, with everything lying at our feet, every moment is filled with the potential for joy, contemplation, and new relationships. The moments are, however, also filled with the potential for grief, pain, and sorrow, as well as every other emotion the human body is capable of.
Still, it is the positive emotions that are worth collecting. They are the ones worth tweaking. Worth enhancing. I believe that photography can assist us in capturing the subtle, less analysed, and more naive moments—the moments that make us feel something.
Because, as one of my musical heroes, Elton John, says in his excellent tune "We All Fall in Love Sometimes":
Full moon’s bright
And starlight filled the evening
We wrote it and I played it
Something happened, it’s so strange this feeling
Naive notions that were childish
Simple tunes that tried to hide it
But when it comes...
We all fall in love sometimes
In a 2013 interview with Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone, Elton explained:
Every lyric on ‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’ was about Bernie and me, about our experiences of being able to make songs and make it big. I cry when I sing this song, because I was in love with Bernie, not in a sexual way, but because he was the person I was looking for my entire life, my little soul mate... I was gay by that time and he was married, but he was a person that, more than anything, I loved.
Love, I think, can take many forms. It is one of the most powerful feelings around. But again, love is one of those emotions that gets corrupted by too much analysis and overthinking. It thrives, however, in a more naive state of mind.
About me
OK, so who am I really? I’ve been asking myself that question several times, but I never seem to agree with myself on it. Not the best outset for an about-site, perhaps, but let's face it, the question itself is meaningless. In fact, I have come to believe that the core identity that we often seem to cling to does not exist.
So, instead of telling you who I am, I’m going to say something about what I like to do and the things that interest me.
I have an unfinished PhD in educational science, where my thesis revolved around educational philosophy and psychology. This work, I have to admit, still defines me somehow and keeps telling me something about certain sides of me. Read one of my articles here.
Additionally, I have contributed to some music productions, which you can view here. Fortunately, I am not featured in any of the band's photos.
Further, I enjoy developing my cooking skills and tasting fine wine. I strive to maintain a food blog (in Norwegian, I’m afraid) that can be seen here.
And then there is photography – that is the main object on this site. It never seems to release its hold on me, so I surrender to it here.
And again, as the quote on the top of this site indicates, understanding what my life means to me has become something of a project. Through photography, I investigate.