PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION

My interest in photography stems from encounters – the encounters I create and record through the lens. Encounters with new places, new people and - increasingly - a new political reality.

The images in ‘Jump’ reflect these encounters through a global journey where identifiable geographical signifiers are consciously and deliberately elided so the viewer never knows if they are in Brooklyn, Bahrain or Burkina Faso. Encounters en route also form the core of ‘Heroes’ where I set up as a traveling photographer throughout the city of Roskilde. The resulting 1,000 Polaroid portraits personally signed by each person I met form a mosaic mural of the everyday heroes who crossed my path.

The role of itinerant photographer was exchanged for that of explorer in ‘Natives: The Danes,’ marking the move from my own personal photographic encounter to an ever increasing awareness of the role of photography as a historically and politically charged medium. It is this power of the image that my more recent projects ‘No Airport to Travel From’, ‘Natives: The Danes’ and ‘Who’s Next?’ They all address the role of the photography in framing and creating prejudices and minorities, and as an instrument of control in categorizing, recording and archiving ‘the other.’

My current artistic practice is focused on the use of photography itself to address these mechanisms and processes: to challenge the basis of historical and contemporary photographic ‘evidence’ and interrogate representational forms. From the colonial images of ‘natives’ photographed from in front and behind on expeditions throughout contemporary Denmark, to mugshots of homosexuals shot in a police station basement in ‘Who’s next?’

‘Who’s next?’ is the title of my latest project. Because as the need for ‘the other’ – religious, sexual, national, political - rises in a global climate of increasing fear, I realize a growing personal need to question the role of my own medium in generating exclusion and stigmatization.

 

by Charlotte Haslund-Christensen