Picture to the left: "The Artist as (a very serious!) Young Man", to the right, some 40 years later trying to measure the light.

15 of April 2013, first day for this site, on which I will display photography, paintings, drawings and some other things.

The last years I have mainly been doing photography. I'm still working with traditional analog silver based material, using film from 35 mm up large format 8x10inch sheet film, though most of my photography during the last 30 years has been done with my old Hasselblad middle format equipment. Large format photography is something I’m still trying to learn – not yet always with very satisfying results, but things can hopefully change!

Normally I work in black and white and do all the printing in my darkroom, but also some scanning and digital printing with pigment based ink on archival sustainable papers. Yes, I also use digital cameras for what they are best at (time savings!). Analog and digital technic doesn’t exclude each other – rather can make a happy combination and invites to experiments.

The easiest way to describing the content of my photography is to say: all kinds of things that catch my eye, when I have a camera at hand and not too shy to use it! But probably 75% of my negatives/prints show landscape, nature and perhaps some odd things around us. Hopefully I will also in due time be able to display some more ambitious projects that are not yet in digital form but in analog prints and negatives, but also single pictures both old an new.

My paintings and drawings on the site are at the moment based on a project that started now almost 20 years back, but still working on it: "To the Ends of the Earth: internal and external travels 1993-1999 –– Memories, to East and West, to North and South.

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eidolon |īˈdōlən| noun ( pl. eidolons or eidola |-lə| )
1 an idealized person or thing.
2 a specter or phantom.
ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek eidōlon, from eidos ‘form.’

The terms eidolon/eidola was originally used by the ancient Greek atomist philosophers (Democritos et al) in their Theory of Perception. They had the view that thin layers of atoms from object in the external world moved towards and integrated with the atom structure of the perceiver, thus making it possible to visually perceive external objects. These thin atom skins, membranes or films from external objects they named eidola – some kind of phantom pictures from objects.
When you view a sharp analog photography with full gradation from shadows to highlights, particularly, say, the face of an already dead person, you can have the strong experience that you have in front of you an eidolon from this very person, integrated with the metal atoms in the once light sensitive silver gelation emulsion – and now saved for eternity!

In this sense, photographing is essentially going out in the world collecting eidola – the camera an eidola catcher!

If you catch the right eidola, perhaps it's ART; if you do something with them, like manipulate them in various ways, perhaps it's also Art; but if you just save and keep eidola for a sufficiently long time they are all at least as interesting as Art - whatever Art is.
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