ALT FOR NORGE, 2012

During our formative years we learn to love our culture, our country, and we are all assigned an affiliation and a dedication towards our nation, without being given a choice, really. It is a priori, engraved in our backbone, without questions – more or less, so to speak.

This series of photographs stems from a wish to present an over dimensioned picture of a culture viewed from the naïve, dreaming mind which characterizes the young man before he is transformed and calibrated into the rationalism and pragmatic materialism of the adult life. When the grayish world surrounding the adolescent suffocates and depletes its magical dreamlike state of mind, he seeks to attach what little he has left of illusion to something tangible. This is the place of transference onto the motherland, a territory known to him since the careless bliss of his childhood, by ways of family life, the meals of everyday, the 17th of May….His upbringing requires him to lay his domain within this territory, and also for him to worship it.

My photographs seek to expand the boarders of reality, staging a childlike patriotism, a loyalty permeated by a kind of innocence. A boy covers his face with a mask made from thin slices of smoked salmon. After a football match a country boy uproots a small spruce which he plants almost ritually in his bed at the hotel.

The boy attaches himself to that which surrounds him, to the everyday life which forged him and carved him, and the remains of the magic of youth dwells in this patriotic dedication – depicted by the surrealism of the photographs. The dark and somewhat loaded atmospheres in the photographs allure to themes connected to the gloomy and almost sad regret of the boys that I imagine inhibits the depth of their consciousness, that the world will never be the same again; a conviction that the cultural identity they are socialized into, constructed by generations of adults, rejects a life of dreams and cast shadow and autumn over a world sprung naked from the teenager’s colorful, inquiring mind.

Outfield Player

The Troll Elk

The Boy with the Golden Trousers

Alt for Norge

Recruitment to the Oil Fairy Tale

Hooligans

Hooligans II

Huldra's Son

Stags Locked in Nutting Battle above Young s Square

The Knave who was so Hungry for Meat

After Cattle Care

The Smell of Christian Blood

Salmon