Can connection with the other save us?

It’s funny you bring this up, because resilience is something that’s been on my mind a lot. Every day, we’re confronted with bad news; the political situation in the United States is atrocious under our president, we’re completely tied to our phones, a sense of evil looms over us like a storm cloud and, on top of that, I’m struggling with my own work at the moment. I’ve been in situations like this before, so I know I’ll manage.

You wouldn’t believe how often I think about that place these days.

Yes, really! It’s been endlessly grey here in Minnesota for such a long time, but this morning the sun was shining and as I sat in that light during my morning meditation, I thought back to that moment on the bench. Just like this morning, there was something about the light that day, in Helsinki. I was meditating – as always a personal concoction of transcendental and Vipassana meditation – and the way the sun reflected on the water caused a breakthrough. There was something strange about being surrounded by light. It’s something that can’t quite be put into words, but it was something that made me feel how everything is one, and how, because of that, I’m connected to everything. After that experience, I tried to chase that feeling for a long time, which of course turned out to be a very bad idea.

That feeling of one-ness is something that overcame me. Trying to strain or force yourself to get it back, completely goes against what we might call the ‘revelation’.

Look: I felt that all is one. I knew it with my body. The issue was that it temporarily took me out of photography. It simply didn’t interest me so much. This feeling of connection and ‘one-ness’ was more important to me than photography, making money, things that my ego more or less was entangled with. For a long time, I was interested in light, sound and connection. Songbook, which I developend prior to that time, dealt with social life, social interaction in the United States, and the idea, the question if social connection had withered, was lost. That series is more in line with the documentary tradition of documenting social life in America.

I think that, for the majority of my life, or at least ever since I can remember, I’ve felt disconnected from others. I don’t think this is unusual. I think this is also human consciousness. Generally, there’s some feeling of disconnection. I think mine was a bit more than some people’s and I framed my understanding of the world in terms of my own separation from it. I think I was drawn to photography because it’s a medium that allows me to meticulously explore that feeling of separation. This feels a bit like therapy by the way, I should pay you.

I grew up in the exurban area of Minneapolis, somewhere between the suburbs and the country, so it’s kind of like no man’s land. It was not easy for me to get to the group of kids I felt some kind of connection with, as I would have had to travel to the suburbs. I was already an outsider in that group and when I went to college that didn’t change. It was a disaster of social exclusion.

Well, I mean, then we would really get into therapy talk and we probably don’t want to go there.

Meditation to me is more about ‘all is connected’ rather than ‘I need to connect with others’. The way in which the light fell on the water and eventually reached my eye was the type of connection that interested me in the period thereafter. I don’t want to sound too woo-woo but there was and is this feeling, where it almost doesn’t matter if you have a connection with a plant or a person. I felt that, and that’s the connection I’m talking about. That sense of connection also changed my life and work for a while.

After that moment on the bench in Helsinki, I knew something had to change. I had this farmhouse without electricity or running water or anything. I went out there and I started just making temporary sculptures and playing with light. Then, after I had done that for some time, I would bring people out there just one-on-one. Without long talks, but just to spend time with someone, as an exchange of energies. And this kid that I worked with, we made a seesaw, you know? I became really interested in the seesaw. The seesaw almost became a metaphor for portraiture, because being on it is about an exchange of energy and that’s the way I look at portraiture.

Previously, I saw photography through the lens of separation. After that illuminating experience, it helped me conceive it through the lens of exchanging energy. A work like Broken Manual, for instance, is completely framed by separation from others, while with I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating this completely shifted.

That’s right. When I would bring people to that farmhouse, those were hour-long sessions in which I wouldn’t speak with the other person. It was about this sense of unease. At least I knew that people would feel extremely awkward at first, as I would sit there with my eyes closed for the first ten minutes, quietly meditating, without any real contact between us.

People were instructed to do whatever, there wasn’t only the seesaw, there were books and there were paints. Gradually, with the help of the objects in space, some type of communication could emerge. We would move towards the seesaw, where energies would exchange. Almost like a clumsy dance. Like two fields of energy in a room, bouncing around.

The person that helped me contact people for this project knew Anna well and told me that she would be a good person to photograph, so I met Anna at her home.

It was a beautiful afternoon. Anna gave me a poster of one of her performances from back in the day, we went through her closet to see what she would wear for the photo, those kinds of things. The time with Anna was a gift, in that amazing home of hers. When I look back at the photo that I took of her, which was published in the book, I see that I was outside and she was seated inside. Ah yes, she was on that beautiful bench and the glass of the window between us. Photography already carries that within itself, because the lens causes a barrier between you and the world. This time I was actively exploring this, adding an extra layer to it. It appeared that there wasn’t a definitive line between inside and outside, instead, they are connected. Light bounces around all over the place, it reaches every part.

Well, the portrait of Anna I think was really my return to photography, my official return and after that I was open to anything. My gallerist in Berlin said to me he’d like me to take his daughter’s picture at their house. And I was like, fine, that’s great, let’s do it. Her grandmother’s dresses lay on her bed, a framed teenager magazine hung on the wall and she was in-between the age of being a child and becoming a teenager.

Hmm, yes. Look, you’re asking serious questions about serious topics and I want to take these matters seriously. However, if I try to answer according to your idea of what it should be, there’s a risk I end up performing authenticity instead of simply being honest. For me, the subject matter is too serious for that.

But you know, I’ll meet you halfway: let me tell you about what comes to my mind when you say you’d like to talk about ‘resilience’. Because the work I made at the time of I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating was almost a lenghthy meditation in itself, when nothing really mattered and I was just ‘doing stuff’. After a while, the reality of the situation came knocking: I had to produce new work, run a studio and, to put it bluntly, make some money. So I started working again, but that also eats away at you, and then everything of course changed in 2020, with Covid, with George Floyd.

In a way, it did. One of the projects in my head, had to do with Abraham Lincoln, the political situation in the United States and Trump’s presidency. And I was trying to jam all my ideas into this form, which made it bullshit.

It was only during a trip with an assistant that things could happen. I said: “We’re not going to do this whole Abraham Lincoln thing. We’re just going to go on a trip and we’re going to let the wind take us wherever, basically let whatever happens happens.” We drove around in a car with all the camera gear and attributes and on the way we would visit Buddhist monasteries, where I would meditate. It gave way to a spirit of openness and possibilities, instead of this feeling of ‘what must be done’ or ‘what’s needed’, and that’s what allowed the new project to really take off. That project became A Pound of Pictures.

With photography, and I think this applies to any art form, it’s like when you learn how to ride a bike: when you’re squeezing the handlebars too tight, nothing will come out of it. There comes a point at which you just have to relax, let go and then it will happen. You can only do this through experience, you know this is the way things go and because of that you know you must persevere. I know that whenever I’m struggling, when there’s this tightness, there’s no air in the work and it simply doesn’t function.

Haha, oh well.

That paradox is exactly what I was working through while making A Pound of Pictures. I need to feel authentic in order to make something, but it can also feel completely wrong to make something authentic or, how should I put it, something that feels wasteful. Right now, I’d love to photograph the plants and flowers in my garden, the garden itself. But at the same time, ICE is rounding people up and deporting them in raids. Will I look back thirty years from now and realize that while ICE was pulling people off the streets, I was out photographing my garden? That doesn’t feel right.

And yet, I trust that something good from this moment in time, something resistant, finds its way into the work. It’s just not a one-to-one relationship. I’m not the photographer who’s going to document ICE deportations directly.

What’s been helping me lately is to think of the things I make as seeds I’m planting here and there. They’re photographs but also conversations, like this one, with you. You do what you believe is right, even if it doesn’t directly make the world a better place. However, it carries the potential to grow, to reach someone else, who might, hopefully, create something beautiful of their own.

Yes, obviously! Though I don’t feel the need to make that a statement.