Pieter ten Hoopen | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Conversation between photographer Pieter ten Hoopen and artist Karin Mamma Andersson.

Transcribed by Natalia Kazmierska.

How did the Stockholm project get started?

Pieter: It began in 2008, during a time when I was at home a lot because of a back injury. I couldnt walk for six months. Over the years, Ive mainly worked abroad and taken many photographs of things that are far removed from my daily life. I moved to Sweden almost 12 years ago and Ive often felt like a stranger in Stockholm. I wanted to take pictures of my city, of the life I live in it.

Karin: I think that in your pictures, theres an enormous isolation. Even if there are several people in the picture, everyone is in their own world.

What relationships do you have to them?

Pieter: Some are people who are very close to me. Others Ive met through an acquaintance. Some I met out on the street and then I photographed them in their home. While taking the portrait, I tried to influence them as little as possible as the photographer. I wanted them to just be, a time-consuming process that most documentation is based on.

Karin: The composition is also special, if you compare it to other pictures youve taken. Often, things are happening in the middle of the photos, and also the tones fade out towards the edges. I was thinking about the picture of the man who sitting with his back towards us.

P: That picture is of one of my oldest friends here in Sweden. It was one of the first pictures I took and the emotional space in it became the theme of the whole project. I have always tried to chase the state I was in when I took it.

Can you describe that state?

P: When Im working, I seldom experience it. But when I saw the negative for that picture, I was confused and elated, for I realised that it was something I had never done before. The simplicity, that I could formulate something in such a simple picture. Many times, to take a portrait of a person is difficult, as everything hangs on an expression and a state.

K: Theres a lot of night; it is as though you try to avoid daylight.

P: I think that I often search from a photographic perspective for a light that only is there at a certain time of the day. The sun is on the way down and then the last of the light can be like silk on skin, so soft and sensitive. That light suited the feeling I was after.

K: Here one feels that you have just seen something and captured it directly. Take the picture of the farewell at the hospital its so good that one almost doesnt believe that its real.

P: A number of people have reacted to that picture. Roffe has just died at the hospital after fighting cancer for many years, and his wife Ulli, children and grandchildren say goodbye to him. I was phoned by a friend, who wanted me to photograph the familys farewell. I reacted to the picture afterwards myself. To show a familys sorrow is rather unusual in Sweden. At the same time, it happens in so many different places all day long throughout the country.

Karin, you work a lot with photography in your painting too.

K: Almost all my art comes from a photograph; its my most important tool. Even as a child, I used to cut out pictures from the newspaper VI that I thought were beautiful, of sailboats and glittering water or the Swedish songwriter Beppe Wolgers, and I saved them in an envelope. I still have them, actually, and I sometimes take them out again. In later years, Ive often used old pictures of crime scenes when I paint. They are completely neutral pictures their only goal is to document. Im completely uninterested in pools of blood and corpses. It is how they have photographed the kitchen or the hall or the garden with the old hammock that I care about. Then I work very quickly, using a projector and sketching the motif on the panel before I put the photo aside and continue without it.

On the contrary, your photographs often look like paintings, Pieter.

P: For me, painting is very important. I am fascinated by the artist Egon Schiele and the emotional state that his paintings portray, sometimes on the edge to madness. That is what I like about painting, that you can express things that photographs seldom can. In your paintings, theres so much telling, Karin. I see you as a storyteller.

K: But that is something that can bother me. I wish I could decide not to be a storyteller sometimes, and could just create an atmosphere without being too literary.

P: I have seldom thought so much about these things as in the Stockholm project. Am I too overtly clear now? I have a fear of not being able to express myself with the photos. Ive felt such a desire to want to tell now. I think it is also because it is mostly about me and my times. At the same time, it can be hard to visualise the place where I live and the people and things that are closest to me. I dont want to be too clear or pathetic.

K: It is only pathetic when it runs over into the banal and unctuous. When you force your own ideas onto it, and leave too many codes. It must be possible to climb between different levels and floors in a work, and there should be crassness and rawness in order for one to be able to take in the beauty. Thats important.

P: I think it becomes pathetic when you become too conscious about what you are good at, and begin to repeat it. Been there, done that that feeling.

You both have a recognisable style - are you scared of getting stuck in a style?

K: Yes, thats the biggest danger. Often I think that it is when others put words on what you do that you know if youve ended up there.

P: To have your own pictorial language is something I always worked towards or longed for after I began working as a photographer. But when you say that this is my language, you risk losing the possibility of developing. For this project, I decided to only work with a camera that was new to me. I didnt have the usual control. It is then, when you question your own knowledge, that something exciting can happen. The uncertainty surrounding creation has probably been the theme throughout this project. I think that to break your own pattern is the only way to find what you have been looking for.

We have talked about solitude as something very negative - but at the same time, to a certain extent, you have both chosen solitude in your work as artists.

K: One side of me wants the collective; for a long time, I thought I would work with film and that art was just a step on the way there. But now I would never manage to work with another person, or even have an assistant.

P: When do you think about being alone in your creation?

K: When I get stuck, think everything is shit and there is no one who can help. One of my first big experiences in art school was when different teachers came into the studio and they all thought different things! It was the first time that I understood that there is only one person in the whole world who knows how this should look, and that is me.

P: When I studied, I often found myself in the same situation, which led to major confusion. You always think someone else has the answer. Now when I choose my pictures for longer narratives, it is a very lonely process. I can bury myself for weeks in material in my house in the country. In a way, it is there, in the solitude, that I can find the truth. What I am looking for. And want to tell.