NIKOLAJ CALLESEN

When I first started getting seriously into photography in a photographycourse in 2001, it was love at first sight. Being out there, treasurehunting the motive, engaging people, the landscape the world, was exactly what I wanted, physical and challenging intellectual as emotional.

I’m very inspired by landscapephotographers, who masters the delicate balances between, aesthetics, challenging subject matter and emotional impact, like American Robert Adams or Dutch Awoiksa van der Molen. But also collage artist like Robert Rauschenberg or contemporary experimenting artist Wolfgang Tillmanns is of a great inspiration to me.

I seek a uniqueness due to a personalized expression in my work. I seek moments of presence with myself and with my surroundings when I make my work, a presence that I hope shimmer through an intensity in my work, an intensity that I this way hope might touch the viewer on recognition and emotional relevance.

I have for a while been searching for a higher degree of physical and tactile involvement in my work. Photography has an enigmatic yet mesmerizing balancing between distance and nearness to it that I love, but I try to challenge this balance. I try to get a bit closer, by drawing on my photographs, this process is very personal, and you might say I try to keep some of the mesmerizing wonder alive, by photographing and printing the drawing afterwards. This is what my new series try to elaborate on, distance and nearness in photographic expression.

Photography and art practice doesn’t necessarily come easy. I had a lot of success after my art degree in Scotland in 2006. But was afterwards hit seriously by depression and didn’t shoot a single image between 2007-2010. The process of getting back into working with images have been very tough, but I also enjoy and appreciate what I do now to a much wider degree.

The photographs of Robert Frank, in the book The Americans first published in 1958, is to me like a lightning from a clear sky, in the history of photography, yes in the history of art. I don’t think this level of clear vison was seen before, and has to a large extent been strived for since, I tend to think at times.

Robert Adams, famous American landscape photographer, in 2018 chose two of my images for a very exclusive group show in Oregon USA, this was a great honor to me, Robert Adams is a big hero of mine.

I draw on photographs but also write and draw in free hand. I hope to have more big shows where I co,mbine the various kind of work I make.

YK has many wonderful works in its collection, to chose a few, I adore the seascapes of Po Chen.