IMPRESSIONS | EXPRESSIONS
by Mads Guldager
335 pages art photography coffee table book. 240 x 270 mm. Hard cover. Printed on 170 gr silk paper. Offset print by Booklab.
Foreword by Jan Grarup, Jens-Peter Brask & Mads Guldager.
Designed by Puk Jaqueline Thorkildsen.
THE DECISIVE MOMENT(s). In 2013, I was contacted by the artist Marco Evaristti and asked to document his Red Crack Project in Norway. In the following years, Art Historian and gallerist, Malou Erritzøe, encouraged me to show my own work. At that point, photography went from being a very serious, but also very private, hobby for me, to being a true obsession. Today I take my camera wherever I go. And some days I realize how I see everything in motifs, color schemes, bleeds and the like.
I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii who had a knack for discovering new species by getting lost in the jungle – going beyond the places and areas he knew, letting the experience take over his knowledge – choosing whatever crossed his path rather than the plan. That story resonated with me - I recognized that spirit in my own approach. Even when visiting familiar places – even in my own neighbourhood, I take new paths as they lay, let the experience and the reality of it rule and determine what my eye and my camera should capture.
Like the botanist, I might think I know what I seek, but the best images are the ones that I didn’t expect to shoot, that I didn’t anticipate. A brief moment sensed rather than planned – letting myself be overwhelmed by our place in nature, glimpsing how we are a small part of something bigger, the feeling of loneliness rendered by an empty space or abandoned place. The calmness and satisfaction rendered by beauty and harmony. And not least – experiencing people - trying to catch all kinds of feelings, diversity, interaction, engagement, in habits, cultural characteristics. Capturing the marks life leaves on people.
Mads Guldager, September 2021