I’ve been writing about New Danish Photography 01 for Ph Museum. You can read my words here. The book is a national survey of contemporary Danish photography, and documentary in particular.
It has a great selection of projects, all of which are really strong. What is also interesting is how committed it is to the idea of documentary, and what documentary can be.
The book is loosely edited along these lines with standard ideas of documentary that run from the blankly evidential – because there are some areas where you need to state what needs to be stated – and the more conventional view (not staged, not lit, not this-that-or-the-other) gradually ceding to more reflexive ideas where the cinematic, unreliable narration, and conflicting perspectives come into play.
The images on this page are by Tobias Nicolai and are maybe an example of a dramatisation of an already dramatised cinnamon based ritual in Jutland. I thought English cheese rolling and bog-diving were odd, but this one takes the Chelsea Bun.
The other really interesting thing is howpinned down the projects are , despite the open approaches and the multiple interpretations they exhibit. There seems to be a current trend for projects to have loose themes of anxiety, alienation, and the uncanny tying in to a narrative that is as random as a tub of spilt redcurrants on an American roadside.
This kind of work always comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is often the brilliant exception. Maybe here the everyday sublime of Rinko Kawauchi, the undecisive moments of Paul Graham, or the wanderings of Raymond Meeks are part of what is influencing. All of whom are brilliant and surprisingly pinned down, but in the hands of others… things might be not quite so satisfying. Similarly, the reflexive musings of Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home, the overuse of archive or family album images in projects related to family histories and personal trauma can result in some of my favourite work. But when it doesn’t, it does get a tad repetitive… Unmoored narratives generally aren’t satisfying, no matter how much undergrowth, mist, or geological detritus you frame it in, no matter how many detached archive pictures or reflexivity accompany it.
The book ends with a short text by Mette Sandbye where she discusses what documentary photography might be; ‘So allow me to set the record straight once and for all,’ she writes. ‘Documentary photography is an art form. Photographers who identify with it glean their material from the real world (just as many painters, installation artists, writers and film directors do), but capture, order, interpret, sort, and present it in photographic form on the basis of a personal position or point of view. A conceptual approach. They do not create fiction, or fact. Rather, they direct an autonomous, creative gase on material found in the world. They tell stories about reality in a new way, guided by an artistic ambition. Sometimes stories about the familiar, or what we thought we knew and have seen many times before. And sometimes about the entirely unknown.’
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