Johanne Seines Svendsen, born 1981, lives and works in the Lofoten Islands, North Norway.
In her artistic practice, she works to create a contemporary expression with historical photographic processes such as the wet plate collodion process. Breaking away from the primary technology in our time, she is seeking to work slower, manually and in constant dialogue with the materiality in her images.
Inspired by social, environmental and cultural tendencies in our time, she has given an introduction to the term "Slow Photography" through her working method, her artistic and academic work.
Seines Svendsen´s portraits captures an intense presence through the long exposure times she utilizes. It is as if something from behind the facade is allowed to come forth. She captures the human being as it is, shaped by it´s creation through life. Likewise, as the plates are shaped by the process it derives from. The long friezes of images - where faces appear to a greater or lesser degree - tells us something about the elusiveness and vulnerability in humanity as well as in photography.
"To photograph is to capture a moment. But it will never be more than just a fragment of the whole. Pieces of presence where we are allowed to look into a person’s riddles, a recording of a condition that occurred for a short spell, attached to the glass. The emulsion in the pictures that chip off are as elusive as we are as people, as fragile, impalpable and imperfect as ourselves."
Johanne Seines Svendsen: "The Slow Photography - In Motion" 2013.
