In 2011 I was invited to come to the island of Gotland and to stay at a small guest house of a Swedish gallerist there. It was a beautiful journey and a horrible one. My marriage was falling apart and life seemed to be taking a very unexpected turn. I took thousands of photographs in Gotland. I then selected almost two hundred and kept them for ten years. My life did indeed take a turn. Many turns. Some magical and some quite dark.
I used an artificial intelligence algorithm to find the emotional connection between the many images I had taken. The result are three series of photographs. This series is about the water and the ground Gotland. Gotland used to be a Viking home. Treasures are still found in the ground of the island. The weather is very moody and so this was a perfect hiding place. Just like the spirits that make the island magical, these photographs seem to be showing objects but they are not. They seem to be tangible but they really show emotions, the feeling of water, the feeling of air, the feeling of the ground.
We look at the world and we create it as we observe it. We have certain expectations of what happiness is, and togetherness and peace. They are all an agreement we created with each other over thousands of years. It takes a crazy mind or a lot of courage to question it all.
And with my photographs that’s exactly what I do. I remove the visible layer of photography and reveal an emotional layer that creates a photography of emotions. The images we look at are beautiful. But they contain pain and doubt and failure. Some images look strange and are not perfect, but they contain love and hope and ideas.
All of this has been discovered and expressed in painting and sculpture and even performative arts. But it has not been dome this way in photography yet. This is the time when it can happen for the first time. Not all photography will look like this in the future. But some photography can look this way because of a collaboration between emotions, humanity and algorithms.
