It lurks fearfully over everything

The Norwegian photographer Kjetil Karlsen writes with light, sometimes so bright that even massive darkness gives way. A new book from Skeleton Key Press is given the title Watching the Silence . The photographer has staged this silence for us; there is nothing about Karlsen's pictures that has any of the contemporary pulse and changeability in it. The images appear with both a historical and a contemporary moment in the same image. But often both as a contrast and perhaps as a romantic swarming, with a longing that contemporary people can feel – in the direction of the robust, which has endured and will endure that future eras also pass.

Picturesque qualities

On the cover is the photograph Nordic Nocturne (2022) reproduced. The black-and-white image shows a solitary female figure, almost in silhouette, in a landscape that is almost being erased. The picture is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the sea (1808–10), which is a good reference for Karlsen's pictures.

Despite the fact that photography can be understood as a mechanical process, there are often far more painterly qualities that come to light.

To capture a moment, but erase the time that lies before and after.

In the book's introductory essay, by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, the results of the French photographer Robert Demachy's technical experiments, with the manipulation of negatives and copies in the 1890s, are pointed to as relevant experiences in connection with Karlsen's pictorial world, but hardly as prerequisites for this. When Demachy worked, photography was not yet properly recognized as an art form, but could be applauded when it appeared in the form of pictorialism, where contours were carefully subdued, as in a painting.

It may seem unnecessary to dwell on painters or photographers from the 1800th century in order to enjoy Karlsen's pictorial world, but relatively many of the images seem well rooted in history. Often it seems that the pictures in the book are about capturing a moment, but erasing the time that lies before and after. There are many associations that emerge in the encounter with the photographs, but aren't these just fleeting impulses – some stanzas of a poem, fragments of a film scene, popular culture, fine culture, dreams and fantasies. But together they have the effect that one experiences figurative hospitality. The book is divided into six separate chapters, which have some different characteristics.

Lost times

Karlsen's pictorial world has its pivot point in Breifjord, south of Narvik, but the picturesque nature is never depicted without undertones. Scared lurks all over the place – and what do you remember? Large, powerful buildings have had their lives and been abandoned. If figures appear, it is almost like seeing explorers in search of something really which may have once resided here, which now only exists in a memory bank. Images that often appear diffuse and incomplete – and therefore make room for the experience of memory.

One of the brightest images in the book is also among the darkest. The picture is called Longing. Outside a snow-covered playground we see a child, dressed in pajamas and rubber boots. In this context, the image stands out by clearly showing a situation that is taking place right in front of our eyes, or as a crystal clear memory that returns at any time. Who is this child? Unlike most of Karlsen's other pictures, it is the facial features and individuality that reveal that we are here facing an individual, a child whose world is closed to us. The empty play stand and the scantily clad child in the snow have no dreams in them, no longing. As if the dream gave direction here, but no longer.

As if the dream gave direction here, but no longer.

In the preface, Minkkinen reflects on man's relationship to what we have around us, what we have been, and how we should approach the future: "Whatever future lies on the other side, it will be a future in which we will need to live together, work together, and survive together. Unless we embrace nature and human nature as coexisting forces and embrace our differences as part of our collective selves, the future we fear will be at our doorstep a lot sooner than the world has yet to imagine." The thinly clad, lonely child can thus also be seen as a necessary reminder of how barefoot we can all become.

Forest mysteries

Many of Karlsen's pictures show diffuse motifs from dark forests, apparently without geographical anchoring, populated by people who look more like ghosts than people – where the boundaries between what you have seen and what you have dreamed cannot be drawn.

There is something playful about these images, even if they often evoke a certain discomfort. A discomfort that persists because time has stopped. Naked people in the forest testify not only to vulnerability, but also to the completely unpredictable difference between human life and scavenger food. The images tend to give a sense of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, where everything familiar has disappeared. Or perhaps more precisely: Everything that has been developed through human activity has been zeroed out. Here, Karlsen grasps the contemporary: Everything can come to an end.

One of the brightest images in the book is also among the darkest. The picture is called Longing.

A majority of the images of what I call forest mystery motifs have something ritualistic about them, in the sense that the figures we see have an activity that seems governed by a certain pattern, but at the same time with a lawfulness we do not know, where the viewers take on the role of anthropologists who gradually uncovering structures in order to understand them, rather than to think something about them. They are as they are, and the less exactly the photographic exposure reproduces the visual impression, the stronger the figures appear: overexposed, as if burned into the photographic material.

Echoes of silence

The book ends with the photograph called Echoes, where a massive rock formation appears in a shape reminiscent of a stylized splash of waves. Two small figures stand in the center of the motif. At first glance, it looks as if the figures are standing close together and looking into the subject, just as we do. Again, it's easy to let my mind drift to Casper David Friedrich, or perhaps the thought of the German romantic never quite disappeared during my reading of the book.

The sublime – understood as the magnificent – meant a lot to romantic art. In the absence of other terms, one can easily say that the sublime is an element that is present in Karlsen's pictures all the time, as both a sublime depiction of nature and destructive action. This is referred to by Immanuel Kant as mathematical and dynamic sublimity respectively. If the image is read as a wave, and two small figures cling to each other, a meaning appears. But the figures do not stand passively and look into the subject, on the contrary, they seem to be in motion, as if in a dance. The movement works in harmony with the landscape, and a community arises, where there is no longer any dissonance.

This is also how Kjetil Karlsen's pictures work. They create a counterweight to the restless, chasing and uncertain that characterizes the time we call ours.