I started photographing when I was 11 and my dad bought a compact camera for the family.
The next ten years I photographed myself and my friends growing into adults. When I turned 16 I got my first DSLR and started taking more professional portraits too. This led the way to more abstract photography, but I never stopped documenting my life. I almost feel nauseous by the thought of not bringing my camera on trips or when hanging with friends and family. Don’t quite know if that’s a good thing…
My photography is often of surreal moments in normal situations, while this particular series are quite different in its cleanness. I made the first picture in 2009, the next in 2011 and the rest while I took a diploma in art photography at the Norwegian School of Photography in 2013/2014. I never put much meaning behind my photographs when I take them – I enjoy the weirdness that I think we all need some more of in our lives. Doing this kind of photography makes me excited, because it is more fun than it’s serious, and this feels quite important in a more than enough serious world. But of course, the association I think we all get to plastic surgery and body image pressure in these pictures, is a severe concern of mine. I am in my own ways affected by this and I guess we all are, in one or another way. I hope to make people stop scrolling for a moment, as much as I want to put a smile on their faces and maybe a little wrinkle on their forehead.
I have thought long and hard about what it is that drags me to all this surrealism and grotesqueness, but I honestly have no clue. Maybe it is me taking my childhood with me as I grow older, maybe I’m only true to my nature, I don’t know. All I know is that nothing gets me ecstatic like child as when I come up with a great idea and get to put it in to life.
I guess that growing older makes me nervous, and I’m not the only one. The pressure that many young boys and girls are struggling with, their own and others expectations about a perfect life and a perfect body, are right down overwhelming and suffocating. There are many good things about the enormous amount of information available to us, but this is not one of them. We are stunted, we have seen it all, nothing shocks us anymore. But at the same time, there are more taboos than ever before. Not having a perfect flat tummy, not having a thigh gap, not having the right clothes. Many places in the world in the 80’s, you were pretty weird if you walked around in a bikini top at the beach. People are getting sick by thinking they are not good enough.
With this particular series of pictures, I think I’m trying to shock people into realizing this is not the way to go. I’m kind of screaming “turn around now, or this is what comes next!”. There have actually been people writing to me asking of the foot is real. I don’t know what to think about that. But I do know that I get an reaction, and I’m just glad we can still react.
Using myself in my photography more and more over the years, has been liberating. Having experienced being deprived control over myself, has made me scared of commitment and scared of closeness. I guess my personal experiences and my search for a calmer inside, have given me some courage. It has been all about taking back some of the control I once lost. I now know that I have a voice, and I want to use it trough my art to tell you that you are human. [Official Website]
