Sverre Strandberg → Sightseeing

What is the relationship between seeing and taking a picture? In «Sightseeing» Strandberg presents a collection of (mostly) double exposed pictures that explore photography as a self-contained ritual. They are taken over the course of five years, captured in popular tourist destinations like Las Palmas, Porto, Lisbon, Disneyland Paris, Berlin Zoo and Norsk Folkemuseum, or other populous sites like the Ikea warehouse.

The departure for each image is the sensation that the situation demands to be photographed. Following this impulse, Strandberg wants to draw attention to the compulsory act of photography to investigate it as ritual – a way of self-affirmation. Attracted by bright colours, iconic silhouettes or strong geometrical patterns, his camera seeks out the shapes and places already exhausted by the popular and commercial. Moments overexposed on the minds and phones of flocks of travellers, and still not considered of great value in the cultural hierarchy of images.

Repetition and double vision run as themes throughout the pages and underline the interest in notions of familiarity and the generic. Occasionally bordering on the graphic, the attention to surface is further enhanced by organising the photographs in pairs on facing pages. Working with spontaneity, chance and the banal as tools, Strandberg digs into the optical unconscious to ponder whether the gesture of photography can be both a diagnosis and a cure.

Relying heavily on multi-exposure in the camera, the making of the photographs introduces chance elements that contribute to the insistence on photography as gesture. It suggests the over-saturation of images as a form of visual hick-up and finds in this a source of new patterns, patterns that are perhaps more revealing of the subject at hand and the prosthetics of our bodies that the camera has become. Delirious at times, these abstractions bring joy and enthusiasm to the concept of the generic.