Uncertain States Scandinavia Issue 11

Anders Schau

Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød

Bjørnar Øvrebø

Juliane Jensen

Lisbeth Johansen

Maija Tammi

Mathilde Pettersen

Sissel Myklebust

Therese Alice Sanne

Legacy

Empire of Light

Alna

Emma Nexus

The Picture of the Yellow Sun

Sick Photography

Searching for cloudberries

A visualization of trauma

Black Sun

Credit: Therese Alice Sanne

ISSUE 11

Issue 11

HISTORY OF SICKNESS AND (ART) PHOTOGRAPHY CHAPTER 3.3. IN SICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAIJA TAMMI

‘Photography is haunted by two chattering ghosts: that of bourgeois science and that of bourgeois art. The first goes on about the truth of appearances, about the world reduced to a positive ensemble of facts, to a constellation of knowable and possessable objects. The second specter has the historical mission of apologizing for and redeeming the atrocities committed by the subservient – and more than spectral – hand of science’, Allan Sekula writes.180 Historical photographs representing sickness and especially the sick carry the baggage Sekula outlines. Patients were exposed to medical experiments and to the camera in the name of science.

Later some sciences were proved to be pseudoscience, and also the ethics of medical photographic practices became questionable. Photographs that once were scientific proof of mental illness would later be seen as exploitation of patients. However, photographic representations of sick people have not been limited only to the walls of the hospitals or to the hands of scientists: artists and photojournalists have also contributed to the canon of images.

This chapter is an overview on how sickness has been represented in photography, and especially in art photography. Photographs originally produced for purposes other than art, even if later shown in a museum or a gallery, are not the main interest of this research as the medical photographs from the nineteenth century have been studied extensively, for example by Baer 1994, Didi-Huberman 2004, and Biernoff 2010, 2012.181 This research aims to examine how artists using photography as their medium have wanted to depict sickness, illness and disease.

Before photography, in the 1700s, doctors observed and experimented on patients in a quest to find the scientific truth of various sicknesses: ‘The clinical gaze is a gaze that burns things to their furthest truth.’182 In practice it was the rich who invested in the clinics and hospitals, and the poor and the sick who gave in to being spectacles in order to benefit from the experiments. In other words the poor became a source of ‘objective interest for the science and vital interest for the rich.’183 The emergence of a new technology, the camera, did not change this.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the camera was perceived as an ideal scientific tool, as seeing equalled knowing. According to Allan Sekula, photography ‘fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of a universal language.’184 At the same time photography was invented, objectivity emerged as a scientific value: ‘[M]en of science started to fret openly about a new kind of obstacle to knowledge: themselves. Their fear was that the subjective self was prone to prettify, idealize, and [...] to see what it is hoped to see’.185 For contemporaries, objective, scientific images were in stark contrast to subjective, artistic images; and the terms mechanical photography and aesthetic photography were used as opposites.186 It was the critics who drew the line between whet-

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her photography was art or science, as was the case with the first official photography exhibition at The Salon in Paris in 1859. Summarised by the researchers Daston and Galison, Charles Baudelaire was outraged about the exhibition, as in his view ‘copying nature’ had nothing to do with art. Luis Figuier, on the other hand, claimed that photographs did have artistic intention and value, which could not be undermined by a simple medium. Things were scandalous the other way round too, with art infecting science, especially when it turned out that the Californian photographer Eadweard Muybridge had retouched his famous photographs of the galloping horse.187 Photography was applied to the structures of the society; it became a tool for defining and classifying. Doctors, police, army and governmental agencies kept systematic archives of portraits.

Physiognomy and phrenology used photography for their ‘scientific’ means. Phrenology mainly focused on the measurements of the human skull, and physiognomy refers to a practice whereby a person’s character or personality can be determined from her or his facial appearance.

For example, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, developed in the 1880s a technique in which he superimposed drawn portraits of people to reveal the most common features of the group. Galton believed that these revealed characteristics could be used as a tool to make diagnoses and to recognise criminals even before they had actually committed a crime.188 ‘No longer would pattern recognition be left to the artists. Murderers or violent robbers could, for example, be brought into focus so that the archetypical killer could appear before our eyes.

The problem of judgment, for someone like Galton, arouse with the artist, and the solution lay in automated amalgamation.’189 In other words the morality Galton was concerned about was between the objective (science) and the subjective (art), and not with the ethicality of physiognomy.

Phrenology and physiognomy were abandoned in the late 1800s as pseudoscience, but photography remained an important tool for doctors and other medical practitioners. By 1859 cameras were being used for documenting disease in Germany, France, England and the United States. The first paper on medical photography was published in 1855, and a journal dedicated to the same subject in 1894.

‘It was not a development to be stopped by complaints that the unbridled use of photography in medical practise had gone beyond discretion and ethics’, academic John Tagg writes about medical photography.190 Photographing diseased body parts is still a common practice in medical literature, however patients’ faces are no longer usually shown.191 Henry E. Sigerist notes that one should remember that medicine is not a natural science: ‘Methods of science are used all the time in combating disease, but medicine itself belongs much more to the realm of social sciences because the goal is social.’192

The earliest British medical photographer Dr. Hugh W. Diamond (1809-1886) believed that photographs of his mentally ill female patients could cure the patients from their self-delusions.

For Diamond photographs were useful patient records and scientific proofs of his patients’ current mental states, but most of all they were a cure.

In 1856 Diamond presented a paper before the Royal Society in which he stated that he was able to cure a female patient of her delusion of being a queen with the help of photography. Diamond had shown the patient portraits of other patients who also imagined being royalty, and the conversation following these photography sessions led to the patient’s cure in four months.193 Diamond documented his patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum outside of London in the 1840s. Despite Diamond’s declaration in his paper that photography worked as a cure, he never photographed his patients again after he left the Surrey Asylum and opened his own clinic in 1858 until his death in 1886.194 Although Diamond actively highlighted the medical significance of his photographs as a cure, researcher Laurie Dahlberg, who has examined a previously unknown album of Diamond’s photographs, argues that Diamond was also experimenting with the artistic side of photography.195 Diamond was one of the founding fathers of the Royal Photographic Society, and his photographs of the patients were shown at Britain’s first photography exhibition at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852.196 Dahlberg notes that Diamond was taking photographs of many things other than just his patients: ordinary people, still lifes, and documentary photographs of antiques.197 Despite the fact that photography was, at the time, still new and a lot of people experimented with it in various ways, Laurie Dahlberg sees that the prominent view of Diamond as a psychiatric photographer is too narrow. She argues that especially women were Diamond’s muses in science but also in art. Another thing she highlights is that Diamond inspired and mentored Henry Peach Robinson, who can be considered as one the first fine art photographers of the time.198 Robinson’s photograph Fading Away (1858) depicts a young girl dying of tuberculosis. The photograph is staged and comprised of five different negatives. I will introduce Robinson’s photograph in more detail later in this chapter.

The Parisian asylum of Salpêtrière became the locus of medical photography of the insane.

Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière was published in three volumes between 1877–1880.

J. M. Charcot, head of the asylum, and Albert Londe, head of the asylum’s photography, launched the periodical New Iconography of the Salpêtrière in 1888, and it ran until 1918.

‘Charcot and Londe presented an image of the insane as the hysteric, an image that dominated the visualisation of the insane well into twentieth century [...] Their classificatory system was as fictive as were the actions of their “pet” patients who quickly learned to act out the stages of hysteria expected by the head of

the hospital and were then photographed.’199 Not everyone believed that photographs could be of help in treating the insane. One of the disbelievers was Charcot’s student Sigmund Freud, who wanted to concentrate on listening to the patient.200 In art, at the end of 1880s, naturalism emerged as a reaction to the artistic composite images mostly made by Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Rejlander and to the mass-produced genre images.201 Nature was supposed to be photographed as it is, and no manipulation of the negatives was allowed.202 Naturalists were interested in the beauty of landscapes and nudes. The art photography of the era concentrated on what is beautiful and entertaining while ‘mechanistic photography’ served science by for example showing how animals moved beyond the scope of human eye.203 Sickness seems not to have fit into the expectations of art photography to be beautiful and entertaining.

For the hundred years following Robinson’s Fading Away, there seems to be very few, if any, art photographs of sickness. However, I have not traced anthologies of individual photographers, but looked at general history books on photography (Rosenblum, 2007, Frizot, 1998), and in these sickness has not been a relevant theme in an art context though prevalent in photojournalism. The only exception I found was modernist photographer Paul Strand’s photograph of a blind woman with the sign ‘blind’ hanging from her neck taken in 1916.204 During these hundred years, photography and the role of the photographer changed significantly: advertising, montage, collage, journalism, straight photography, new objectivity, photography books, snapshots, and museum exhibitions arose. There was a significant increase in the number of photographers, and available techniques and also the uses of photography, which also meant ‘that artists were able to expand their horizons, confront new kinds of subject matter, and embrace new concepts and ideologies.’205 In 1979, Roland Barthes wrote that everything in society has transformed into images.206 Everything was photographed, also sick and suffering, just rarely for art, but for photojournalism and private use. However, some genre photography diminished. For example photographing the dying and the dead in private homes had been a common mourning practice in the mid-nineteenth century, but a hundred years later the practice had slowly disappeared and documenting illness and death became inappropriate even in homes.207 The emergence of photojournalism and social photography produced a wide range of images of malnourished, poor and disabled people, from Jacob Riis’ slum photographs in the late 1880s, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier in 1936, W. Eugene Smith’s Life magazine reportages in 1940s and 1950s, to Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of the poor and malnourished in the 1970s and 1980s, and to numerous other documentary photographs. One particular example

is W. Eugene Smith’s and Aileen Smith’s book Minamata, published in 1975, which depicts the outcome of mercury being released into the ocean, causing Minamata disease. In the most known photograph of the series, a mother holds her daughter, Kamimura Tomoko, who is blind, deaf and whose legs are undeveloped.

However, these socially motivated photography projects faced new challenges in the 1980s according to historian Naomi Rosenblum: ‘One was the observation on the part of some critics that photographing the poor (other than someone within the community) was a form of exploitation.’208 Susan Sontag questioned in the 1970s the ethics of photographing suffering people without arousing compassion. According to her, these kinds of photographs might lower our threshold of what people find tolerable, but they also numb and make people less prone to help others in real life.209 Sontag wrote especially about Diane Arbus’ photographs. Arbus photographed dwarves, giants and mentally challenged people in the US mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Sontag writes: ‘Her works show people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive’210 and that these photographs ‘make a compassionate response feel irrelevant.’211 Also as curator Carol Squiers points out that in the 1980s photographers depicting AIDS were criticised especially if they showed the diseased people as pitiful victims. In 1988, ACT UP group demonstrated in front of the Museum of Modern Art against Nicholas Nixon’s exhibition People with AIDS. The headline of the fliers read: ‘No More Pictures Without Context’.212 Especially in the 1980s photographers turned the camera towards themselves to document their own or their family member’s sicknesses. According to historian Stanley Burns, the reason why documentary photographers started to make projects about the sick, dying and dead in the 1980s was because death and dying had become so depersonalised in modern society, that there was a vacuum for individual expressions of illness213.

In the late 1980s, the human body was the subject in numerous photography works, which commented on gender, ageing, race, and modifications of the body. According to academic Liz Wells, it was the AIDS epidemic and the rise of critical photographic theories that gave rise to the unforeseen interest in the human body in the late 1980s.214 Stanley Burns also notes that in the 1990s, at least in America, people with a long-term sickness could stay at home until the death, and this in turn resulted in a new emergence of a genre of images documenting death and dying at home.

Also, for example breast cancer, which had been a secret family matter until the 1980s, became a public topic in America. Private individuals and public health advocates started talking about breast cancer, and the press started covering survivor stories and interviewing relatives of those who had died.

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Also artists started covering breast cancer, for example Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) examined her own and her mother’s breast cancer experience. Wilke’s large photographic prints depicting her own and her mother’s illness and treatment were exhibited and awarded after her death in numerous museums and galleries. Not all art photography about sickness was exclusively personal, some was also political. Jo Spence (1934–1992) made political art about her own breast cancer in the 1980s. She was keen to question the representations of the sick body and to problematise Western medicine. Robert Mapplethorpe enraged museum curators during the AIDS epidemic with a self-portrait which showed a horsewhip inserted into his anus.

During the same century, the camera and other visual technologies became more than ever extensions of human vision, showing parts of the body that had never been visible before. As new medical research methods were developed (ultrasound, CAT, MRI), the human body morphed into scientific data.216 The new visual methods, like ultrasound, overrode the old use of traditional photographs as a source of medical knowledge.

Objective, mechanical photography had actually lost most of its scientific value already in the beginning of the 1900s as it was acknowledged that straight, un-manipulated and un-interpreted photographs were too particular, too accumulated, too specific, to be able to communicate scientific information.217 ‘By the mid-twentieth century, objectivity and subjectivity no longer appeared like opposite poles; rather, like strands of DNA, they executed the complementary pairing that underlay understanding of the working objects and science.’218 In the twenty-first century, photography stories about personal illnesses have become more common online than before. Professor Rebeca Pardo and Montse Morcate, who have researched photographic representations of illness, death and grief in social networking sites, suggest that these types of images are becoming acceptable again.219 Their data show that there is an increase in the representations of illness and death in social networking sites, whereby people are sharing their personal encounters with illnesses. Pardo and Morcate describe the produced images as sort of commonplace family photos, different from the representations for example in the arts.220

Through Invasive Surgery, was published in 1997.

Raphaël Dallaporta’s Fragile (2010) portrays sickness post-mortem. Dallaporta photographed, in a visually stylised way, the failed organs responsible for a person’s death.

180

206 207

A Sekula, ‘The traffic in photographs’, Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, (Spring, 1981), p. 15–25, 1981, p. 22.

181

182 183 184

185 186 187 188 189 190

191 192

193

194 195 196 197

Nonetheless, diary-like photographs of illnesses are also common in art photography. Photographer Phillip Toledano pointed his camera towards his father’s struggle with a memory disease in Days with My Father (2010). Henrik Malmström’s On Borrowed Time (2010) shows the last few months of the artist’s sister dying of cancer. Nancy Borowick documents in Cancer Family (2015) her parents being sick with cancer and dying from it.

198

Art photography works that deal with disease, rather than the illness experience, are more rare.

Max Aguilera-Hellweg has photographed invasive surgeries with a large format camera. His book The Sacred Heart, An Atlas of the Body Seen

204

199 200 201

202 203

205

G Didi-Huberman, Invetion of hysteria: Charcot and the photographic iconography of Saltpêtiére, The MIT Press, 2004. And U Baer, ‘Photography and hysteria: Towards a poetics of the flash’, Yale journal of criticism, Spring94, Vol. 7 Issue 1, 1994. Also S Biernoff, ‘Medical archives and digital culture’, Photographies 5:2, 2012. And S Biernoff, ‘Flesh poems: Henry Tonks and the art of surgery’, Visual Culture in Britain 11(1), 2010.

Foucault, The birth of the clinic, 1994, p. 120.

Foucault, The birth of the clinic, p. 85.

A Sekula, ‘The body and the archive’ in The contest of meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, R Bolton (ed.), Cambridge, MIT Press, p. 343–389, 1992, p. 343.

L Daston, P Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2010, p. 34.

Daston, Galison, Objectivity, 2010, p. 133.

Daston, Galison, Objectivity, 2010, p. 131–132.

Wells 2009, p. 164–167 and Bates 2009, p.

71.

Daston, Galison, Objectivity, 2010, p. 169.

J Tagg, The burden of representation. Essays on photographies and histories, Macmillan Education Ldt Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, London, 1988, p. 81.

D Lupton, Medicine as culture, 2003, p. 76.

H E Sigerist, A history of medicine, Volume 1, Primitive and archaic medicine, Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford, 1987, p. 14.

H W Diamond, ‘On the application of photography to the physiognomic and mental phenomena of insanity’, read before the Royal Society in 1856 in S L Gilman (ed.), The face of madness.

Hugh W. Diamond and the origin of psychiatric photography, Echo Point Books & Media, Brattleboro, Vermont, 1976, p. 23–24.

S L Gilman (ed.), The face of madness, 1976, p. 10–11.

L Dahlberg, ‘Dr Diamond’s day off’, History of photography, 39:1, 3–17, 2015, p. 1.

R Landsdown, ‘Photographing Madness’, History today, September 2011:47–53, p. 47.

L Dahlberg, History of photography, 2015, p.

7. Also S L Gilman (ed.), The face of madness, 1976, p. 7.

Dahlberg, History of photography, 2015, p. 7.

Gilman, Disease and representation, 1988, p.

43.

Gilman, Disease and representation, 1988, p.43–44.

N Rosenblum, A world history of photography, fourth edition, Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, London, 2007, p. 237.

Rosenblum, A world history of photography, 2007, p. 238.

Rosenblum, 2007, p. 297.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, accessed May 10, 2017, www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-ofart/33.43.334/ Rosenblum, 2007, p. 297.

208 209 210 211 212 213

214 215

216

217 218 219 220

R Barthes, Camera lucida: Reflections on photography, Hill & Wang, New York, 1981, p. 118.

R Pardo, M Morcate, ‘Illness, death and grief: daily experience of viewing and sharing digital images’, in Digital photography and everyday life, E Gómez Cruz and A Lehmuskallio (eds.), Routledge, London and New York, p. 70–85, 2016, p. 70.

Rosenblum, 2007, p. 544.

S Sontag, On photography, 2011, p. 40.

Sontag, On photography, 2011, p. 33.

Sontag, On photography, 2011, p. 40.

C Squiers, The body at risk, 2005, p. 156.

S B Burns, Sleeping beauty. Memorial photography in America, Twelvetrees Press, 1990, appendix Death in America: A Chronology.

L Wells (ed.), Photography: A critical introduction, London, Routledge, 2009, p. 161.

S Braun, ‘The history of breast cancer advocacy’, Breast Journal, May 2003 Supplement 2, Vol. 9, 2003, p. 102–103.

L Wells, Photography: A critical introduction, 2009, p. 162–186. Also D Bate, Photography: the key concepts, Berg, New York, 2009, p.

48–71.

Daston, Galison, Objectivity, p. 36.

Daston, Galison, Objectivity, p. 36.

Pardo, Morcate, Digital photography and everyday life, 2016, p. 70.

Pardo, Morcate, Digital photography and everyday life, 2016, p. 81.

This text was originally published in Maija Tammi’s book Sick Photography. Representations of Sickness in Art Photography (Aalto ARTS Books, 2017). maija@maijatammi.com www.maijatammi.com

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BJØRNAR ØVREBØ ALNA River-father Waterfall-mother Text: Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen hei@bjornarovrebo.com www.bjornarovrebo.com

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Alna eviggamle generasjoners elvefar fossemor

Alna river-father waterfall-mother of eternally old generations

metafor for minner bilder av og på

metaphor for memories pictures of and about

ALNA evigunge guttejente jentegutt i kåte kast snøværs regnværs iltre viltre avkom tilkommer og tilkom livet Alna barn av skyer barnebarn og barnebarns barn av skyer tilkommer og tilkom havet

hva Heraklit sa at man ikke to ganger kan stige ned i samme elv er i sannhet en sannhet med modifikasjoner dråpen som falt er dråpen som faller den havet tar imot fordamper og lar stige kondensere og falle igjen og igjen samme regn samme elv i meteorologisk loop med den fysikken regner himmelen den elv som rant er den som renner og at kortest avstand mellom da og nå eller mellom høy og lav ikke er den lodde linje (det løp skal tidlig krøkes som skal bli meander) som jorda snurrer snurrer vi som regnet klimprer på en rusten hjulkapsel eller den nesten uhørlige musikken som regn spiller på bregneblader du står og lytter stum som en stamme flådd for ord ikke for minner gjennomrustne bilvrak kamuflert som høstløv hva er jern og hva er jord rester av et leirbål et blikkbestikk kanskje slo en tater leir her en skitten gammel pute klemt inn mellom to trær hvem satt på den? hvem tilhørte den tronen?

ALNA eternally young boy-girl, girl-boy in playful gusts in snow in rain fiery wiry offspring belong and belonged to life Alna child of clouds grandchild and grandchild’s child of clouds belong and belonged to the sea what Heraclitus said that one cannot step twice in the same river is in truth a truth with modifications the drop that fell is the drop that falls that the sea receives evaporates and makes rise condense and fall again and again the same rain the same river in a meteorological loop those are the physics the sky reckons with the river that flowed is the one that flows and that the shortest distance between then and now or between high and low is not the vertical line (the course that is to be a meander must be bent early) as the earth spins we spin as the rain strums on a rusty hubcap or the almost inaudible music that rain plays on bracken leaves you stand and listen silent as a tree trunk flayed of words not of memories rusted car wrecks camouflaged as autumn leaves what is iron and what is earth remains of a campfire a tin cutlery set perhaps a gypsy camped here a dirty old cushion squeezed in between two trees who sat on it? who did that throne belong to?

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This is my peregrination.

It is a story of human nature.

And the waiting before it appears.

The dew that makes the mist wet in the morning.

Cloudberries in an old bowl.

Maternity and the child’s presence.

The fragility of the moment.

In everyday life.

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MATHILDE PETTERSEN Mine prosjekter kretser omkring portrettet og selvportrettet, og berører i sin tematikk moderskapet og familien som konstellasjon.

Prosjektet tar form ved å skildre en følelse av dysfunksjonalitet over kvinnekroppen ved infertilitet, ett tema som ofte er tabubelagt i vårt samfunn, men utvikles og tar en ny retning i forbindelse med graviditet. Studien videre viser barnets utvikling og kvinnekroppens forandring i løpet av en tiårs-periode, i sammenheng med forholdet til naturen og livs-sykluser.

My projects revolve around portraiture and self-portraiture, and in their themes touch upon motherhood and family as constellations.

So does this project, presently spanning ten years now. It takes shape by depicting a sense of dysfunctionality of the infertile female body - a theme that is often taboo in our society – before it turns and grows in a new direction when discovered not, moving on to contemplate the development of the child and the changes of the body of its mother over time in connection with life cycles in nature. mathildepettersen@gmail.com www.mathildepettersen.com

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THERESE ALICE SANNE Svart Sol Følelsen av å være fanget i et indre kaos – en eksistensiell krise – kan bare oppleves av en selv.

Motsetningen mellom det ytre vi kan se og en persons indre tanker, er ofte for stor til å begripe.

I prosjektet mitt om unge mennesker og psykisk helse har nettop denne usynlige smerten vært en utfordring å fotografere. Løsningen kom til meg på et besøk hos avdelingen for spiseforstyrrelser ved Gaustad. Der bruker pasientene kunstterapi aktivt for å oppdage deres indre landskap og finne frem til ord på ubestemmelige og kaotiske følelser.

Det eneste riktige for meg og mitt prosjekt ble å involvere personene jeg fotograferte ved å la de få etterbehandle printene av de selv – i et forsøk på å fortelle om noe av det som foregår på innsiden.

Black Sun The feeling of being caught in an inner chaos – an existential crisis – can only be experienced by one self. The contradiction between the exterior that others perceive and a person’s innermost thoughts is often too big to comprehend. In my project about mental health among young people this invisible pain has been a challenge to convey. The solution came to me on a visit to the outpatient clinic for eating disorders at Gaustad hospital.

There, patients use art therapy to reveal their inner landscape and to connect words to indeterminate and chaotic feelings. In the attempt to express what’s going on internally in my subjects, the only way forward for my project was to involve them by letting them postprocess prints of themselves. therese.alice.sanne@gmail.com www.theresealicesanne.com

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Credit: Sissel Myklebust

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ANDERS SCHAU Arven Deler av livet mitt er metaforisk knytt sammen, jeg ønsker og knyte opp knutene, finne en bedre müte og huske det pü.

Legacy Parts of my life are metaphorically linked, I want to untie the knots, find a better way to remember it. anders@photographer.net @Anders_Schau

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JULIANE JENSEN Juliane_888@msn.com

EMMA NEXUS Mennesker ruser seg av mange forskjellige grunner. Det kan være virkelighetsflukt, nytelse, nysgjerrighet eller spirituell oppvåkning. Prosjektet utforsker de mentale og fysiske endringene på kroppen under påvirkning av ulovlige rusmidler.

Denne serien inkluderer marijuana, MDMA og visse typer psykedelika som psilocybin sopp, 2C-B og DMT. Ordet psykedelika betyr tankemessig, som i å åpne sinnet til nye perspektiver. En endring i perspektiv er en av grunnene til at psykedelika og MDMA nå brukes i klinisk forskning som potensiell medisin for å lindre depresjon, angst eller avhengighet.

Noen forskere hevder at psykedelika utgjør mindre risiko enn å sykle, og mange av de ulovlige stoffene har blitt klassifisert som mindre skadelig enn alkohol - både når det gjelder psykisk skade og negative sosiale konsekvenser. Hvorfor er ikke dette den dominerende kollektive oppfatningen?

Hvorfor er synspunkter om rusmiddelbruk ofte så svart eller hvitt istedenfor nyansert? Prosjektet er et resultat av nysgjerrighet og en følelse av at vi trenger mer kunnskap om rus og bruk av rusmidler.

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MDMA “En venn og jeg bestemte oss for å ta med kjærestene våres på en MDMA tur. Det endte opp med alle sammen i badekaret, med utforskning av hverandres kropper. Overraskende nok var det ikke seksuelt overhodet, mer som en barnlig nysgjerrighet. Det gjør at du føler deg som et barn igjen på mange måter siden alt føles nytt og fantastisk.”

2C-B “Jeg følte meg sjøsyk hele tiden på 2C-B. Alt rundt meg svømte. Jeg kunne ikke rømme fra det, fordi da jeg lukket øynene så jeg masse geometriske mønstre og farger som danset. Det var vakkert, men jeg kommer til å ta en lavere dose neste gang.”

DMT “Jeg ble tilbudt en pipe med DMT på en strand en dag. Jeg røykte den, og plutselig begynte de svarte steinene foran meg å skifte form. Dag skiftet til natt. Det føltes ut som at kroppen min lyste opp som et bål. En miks av munker og dødseterne fra Harry Potter med oransje kapper dukket opp

og lagde en stor sirkel rundt meg. Alle holdt en hånd på skuldrene mine og jeg kunne føle en sterk følelse av kjærlighet. De sa til meg at det var kjærligheten menneskene i livet mitt følte for meg.

Jeg har følt meg uelsket i løpet av barndommen min og store deler av livet, så det var veldig meningsfullt.”

Psilocybinsopp “Jeg så på soloppgangen med en venn på en tropisk strand. Vi hadde spist sopp en time tidligere, og vi satt der i to timer og bare stirret. Vi kunne se alle de forskjellige gule og oransje tonene på himmelen og fargene føltes sterkere. Vennen min begynte å gråte fordi det var så vakkert.”

LSD “Andre gangen jeg prøvde LSD hadde jeg en bad trip. Det var kult i begynnelsen siden planter grodde mens jeg stirret på de, men etter en stund forsvant vennen min og kjæresten hennes inn på et rom. Plutselig startet jeg å føle meg veldig alene og tankene mine begynte å bli sinnsyke. Jeg så på huden min og den var full av larver. Jeg så ut av vinduet, og takene på husene utenfor var fulle av

rotter. Alle malerier og bilder på veggen var som en film, og jeg hørte skudd og folk som skrek. Det føltes ut som om jeg holdte på å dø da jeg gikk inn på et mørkt rom for å prøve å sove det vekk. Jeg følte at jeg måtte konsentrere meg for å puste og holde meg i live.”

Psykedelika (ukjent) “Jeg hadde en paradoksal følelse av å flyte ut av rommet og kroppen min inn i et mørkt landskap, mens jeg var fullstendig våken og bevisst. Det var som om grensen av min selvfølelse hadde utvidet seg og jeg var en del av havet, ikke en bølge. Det var fullstendig intet og det uendelige universet på samme tid. Jeg følte at det var et skille mellom følelsene, tankene mine og min bevisste opplevelse. Jeg så negative tanker flyte forbi, men jeg trengte ikke å knytte meg til dem. Jeg forstår nå forskjellen mellom jeg er deprimert og jeg føler meg deprimert. Jeg ser ikke lenger ut til å være kun definert av følelser og tanker som jeg erfarer.”

Issue 11

EMMA NEXUS People are getting high for many different reasons - be an escape from reality, curiosity, pleasure or a spiritual awakening. This project is exploring the mental and physical changes that occur when under the influence of illegal drugs.

These drugs include cannabis, MDMA and certain psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, 2C-B and DMT. The word psychedelic means mind-manifesting, as in opening up the mind to new perspectives. A change in perspective is one of the reasons why psychedelics are now used in clinical research as a potential medicine to relieve depression, anxiety or addiction.

Some claim that these drugs are as safe as riding a bike, and most illegal drugs have been classified as less harmful then alcohol - both in terms of psychical detriment and adverse social consequences. Why is this not the dominant collective story? Why are views on drug use often so black and white? This project is the result of curiosity and a sense that we need more knowledge about drugs and drug use.

MDMA “One time a friend of mine and I decided to take our girlfriends on a trip with MDMA. It ended up with all of us in the bathtub, exploring each others bodies. Surprisingly it was not sexual at all, more like childish curiosity. It makes you feel like a child again in many ways, since everything feels new and fantastic.”

2C-B “I felt seasick the entire time on 2C-B. Everything around me was swimming. I couldn’t escape from it, because when I closed my eyes, I saw a lot of geometric shapes and colours that were dancing.

It was beautiful, but I will take a lower dose next time.”

DMT “I was offered a pipe with DMT on a beach one day. I smoked it and suddenly the black rocks in front of me started to form. The day changed into nighttime. My whole body was lightning up like a fire. Some mix of monks and the Death Eaters from Harry Potter with orange capes showed up and gathered a circle around me. All of them

held their hand on my shoulder and I could feel a strong feeling of love. They said to me that it was the love the people in my life felt for me. I’ve felt unloved during my childhood and for most of my life, so it was very meaningful.”

Psilocybin (Mushroom) “I watched the sunrise with a friend on a tropical beach. We had eaten mushrooms one hour before and we just sat there for two hours looking. We could see all the different yellow and orange tones in the sky and the colours felt stronger. My friend started to cry because it was so beautiful.”

LSD “The second time I tried LSD, I had a bad trip.

It was cool in the beginning since plants were growing while I was watching it, but after a while my friend and her boyfriend went into a room for themselves. I suddenly started to feel really alone and my mind started to go crazy. I looked at my skin and it was full of caterpillars. I looked outside the window and the rooftops on other houses were full of rats. All paintings and pictures were like a film, and I heard shots and people who screamed.

It felt like I was going to die when I went to bed in a dark room to try to sleep it off. I felt I had to concentrate to stay alive and keep breathing.”

Unknown psychedelic “I had a paradoxical sensation of floating out of the room and my body into a black space, while I was entirely aware and conscious. It was as if the boundary of my sense of self had expanded and I was part of the ocean, not merely a wave. It felt like complete nothingness and the infinite universe at the same time. I had the sense that there was a separation between my feelings and thoughts and my conscious experience. I saw that negative thoughts would float by, but I didn’t need to attach myself to them. I understand now the difference between I am depressed and I am feeling depressed. I no longer seem to be only defined by feelings and thoughts that I experience.”

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Issue 11

ASTRID GJERSØE SKÅTTERØD Empire of Light Da vi bestemte oss for å gjøre en avis med temaet mental helse tenkte jeg med en gang hvor viktig søvn er for vår fysiske og psykiske helse, da søvnforstyrrelser alene bidrar til mange stygge sykdommer, men også psykiske lidelser som depresjon, angst og selvmordsforsøk.

Temaet ligger nært, og det kommer av at jeg lot skjermer ødelegge søvnen min helt en periode jeg gamet døgnet rundt. Døgning førte til flere nifse episoder som den gangen jeg hadde en ut av kroppen-opplevelse og søvnparalyse samtidig. I slutten på den søvnløse perioden fotograferte jeg nabolaget mitt sent på natta hvor bildetitlene ble ulike søvnforstyrrelser jeg kjenner til og har lidd av.

De nye bildene “Empire of Light” fokuserer på hvorfor vi ikke sover, om lysforurensing og eksponering av kunstig lys, da spesielt blått LED lys.

When we decided to make this issue about mental health I at once made the connection that we need sleep for our mental health and well-being. Fitting Charlotte Brontë´s prophetic wisdom that a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow sleep disruption contributes to all major psychiatric conditions including depression, anxiety and suicidality.

The reason for bringing this up is because of excessive use of screens ruined my sleep entirely at a time I was gaming twenty-four seven. I adopted a deranged sleep-wake cycle, I could stay up for days feeling drunk from light exposure and when I finally crashed I only slept for two hours. This induced a lot of uncanny episodes such as having a sleep paralysis and out of the body experience at the same time. At the end of my insomnia struggle I photographed the neighbourhood at night and titled each work a sleep disease I have encountered some time in my life.

The new work “Empire of Light” focuses on the proliferation of blue-emitting LEDs in our artificial lit lives, light poluttion and other things that affect the quality of our sleep. www.astrid-gs.com @uncertain.astrid

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I love screens.

I hate screens.

Issue 11

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Issue 11

LISBETH JOHANSEN Billedet af den gule sol er et personligt projekt, centreret omkring relationen til min far der led af skizofreni og som døde i 2002.

Projektet, der oprindeligt er startet som en bog, er en visuel fabel bestående af ældre fotografisk materiale fra mit eget analoge arkiv, billeder fra familiealbummet samt nye fotografier. Billederne i bogen er samlet under titlen Billedet af den gule sol , som refererer til et maleri af min fars, som jeg fandt i hans dødsbo, og som jeg ikke længere er i besiddelse af. Et billede af en gul sol med titlen ‘Opstandelse’. Projektet fungerer i sin helhed som en rekonstruktion af minder, men bliver i den forstand også en fortælling om tabet af et nærtstående menneske, som langsomt er gået i opløsning.

Bogen, der p.t. eksisterer som en dummy i en edition på fem, er planlagt til at udkomme på Breadfield Press i foråret 2020.

Det har bl.a. været min hensigt med projektet at skabe fokus omkring psykisk sygdom samt rykke ved de eventuelle tabuer og vanskeligheder, der kan være i forbindelse med sorg, når et nærtstående familiemedlem med psykisk sygdom eller misbrugsproblemer dør.

The Picture of the Yellow Sun is a personal project centered around the relation to my father, who suffered from schizophrenia and died in 2002. The project is a visual fable consisting of archival material from my own analogue archive, images from the family album, and new photographs. The images are collected under the title The Picture of the Yellow Sun. The title refers to an old painting of my fathers, I found in his apartment when he died, which is no longer in my possession: A painting of a yellow sun with the title ‘Resurrection’. The project works as a reconstruction of memory but becomes in that sense also a story about a loved one, who slowly disappears.

The book, which today exists as a dummy in an edition of 5, is planned to be published by Breadfield Press spring 2020.

Among other things, my intention with the work has been to put focus on mental illness and to shed light on any taboos and difficulties that may be associated with grief, when a related family member with mental illness or abuse problems dies. mail@lisbethjohansen.dk www.lisbethjohansen.dk

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Subscribe to the newspaper at info@ucsscandinavia.com | Follow us on Instagram: ucsscandinavia Uncertain States Scandinavia DA NO 916337027 Edited by Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød, Tor S Ulstein and Charlie Fjätström.

Design By James Young. Printed by Sharman & Company Ltd, Peterborough.

We welcome submissions from lens-based artists for further publications.

For all enquiries please contact info@ucsscandinavia.com

SISSEL MYKLEBUST sisselannett@gmail.com www.sissel-annett.com

Prosjektet har ikke fått noe navn enda og er forsatt under produksjon.

Denne fotoserien beskriver jeg igjennom en enkel og visuell fotografisk og mix media, hvordan mennesker opplevd og kommer seg igjennom traumatisk opplevelser.

Jeg har gjort en rekke intervjuer med mennesker som har blitt utsatt for traumatiske hendelser. Jeg ber hver enkel å beskrive hvordan de opplevde hendelsen med en setning. Som forklarer hvilke følelse de sitter igjen med i etterkant.

Setninger som :`Jeg skulle ønske jeg hadde pigger som jeg kunne slå ut igjennom huden min, slik at menn sluttet og ta på meg.`

De fleste jeg har snakket med har ulike opplevelse og omstendigheter, men følelsene av håpløshet, usynlig for omgivelser og som en straff for deres eksistent. Traumen kommer plutselig og er ukontrollerte, overveldende og vekker en ekstremfølelse av hjelpeløshet og redsel.

The project has not been named yet and is still in production.

This photo series I describe through a simple and visual photographic and mix media, how people experienced and get through traumatic experiences.

Most people I have talked to have different experiences and circumstances, but the feelings of hopelessness, invisible to the surroundings and as a punishment for their existence. The trauma comes suddenly and is uncontrolled, overwhelming and arouses an extreme feeling of helplessness and fear.

Jeg har valgt og bruke enkle og ulike fotohistoriske mørkeroms teknikker. Dette gjør bildene renere, annerledes og mer utrykksfulle enn `vanlig` fotografier. Som har gitt meg en større kunstnerisk frihet.

I have done a number of interviews with people who have been exposed to traumatic events. I ask each person to describe how they experienced the incident with a sentence. Which explains what feeling they are left with afterwards.

I have chosen and used simple and different photohistorical darkroom techniques. This makes the images cleaner, different and more expressive than `regular` photographs. Which has given me greater artistic freedom.

Phrases like: “I wish I had spikes that I could punch through my skin so that men would stop touching me.”