Softcover 1st edition
OON (2016)
120 pages
b/w photos
paperbacks 21 cm x 27 cm
english
design and Layout: Jonas Westman
limited to 400 copies
PHOTOGRAPHER:
Pierre Vincensini,
Hanna Lindgren,
Rickard Falk,
Joakim Kocjancic,
Nina Hove,
Lo Vahlström,
Theo Elias Lundgren,
Erhan Can Akbulut,
Stefan Wallin
Out of Necessity carries on. Some of the photographers remain the same and some are new, but they all share similar ideas about photography. In Oon 2 they tell their own visual story, again in black and white. As in volume 1 the images reveal the photographer’s personal relationship to Stockholm, but this time they are sometimes taken elsewhere. Oon 2 is an attempt to stretch the borders of the visual narrative in order to reach the reality beyond the expected. In different ways these photographers keep on insisting on the necessity of their photo taking.
I wonder if this necessity has to do with the unique way that seeing and creating coincides in photography. Because is not the photographic image at the same time a discovery of something that already exists and the photographer’s creation?
Ingmar Bergman often shut his eyes during film shoots. Hearing is more in tune with emotions than sight, he said.
The visual can intrude and penetrate our eyes with more than we want to take in. But sight is special also in other ways. We can hear ourselves talk, but we cannot see ourselves looking (except in the mirror). Sight, as opposed to the other senses, is built on a differentiation between the internal and the external world. Freud insisted on the role played by visual images in our memories, dreams and mental representations.
Does the image show what is visible, or is it the image that makes it visible? “The swimmer unknowingly skims over a whole buried universe which would frighten him if he looked at it with undersea goggles”, said Merleau-Ponty.
What is interesting is not vision per se, but what we do with the images that come to us from outside. We can look and then close our eyes. It is at this crossroad between external and internal that new images, new representations, new thoughts are created.
As for the photographer, discovery and creation can coincide in the spectator.
Perhaps photography not only renders visible what has been, for us, invisible. Perhaps it can also make us discover the invisible behind the dazzlingly visual.
Leslie Defte Dahlman
