Eye as a Camera explores the ways in which Emma Aars has been surrounded by the camera: growing up in a family of photographers, spending a summer modelling in New York as a teenager, and studying art writing. Drawing on the work of Ishiguro Miyaki, Nigel Shafran, Jamie Hawkesworth and others—as well as an essay on photography by the legendary Camilla Collett—Aars aims to create a visual language that sharpens the blur.
Søsterskap (Sisterhood) brings together photographers of different generations from the Nordic countries whose works reflect the socio-political context of the welfare state. The interplay between photography and this social democratic model is here seen as a key factor in defining the rich and multifaceted panorama of camerawork from the region, spanning from the 1980s to today. This publication accompanied the 2023 exhibition Søsterskap—Contemporary Nordic Photography, invited as one of the main exhibitions for the Les Rencontres d’Arles.
Why must the mounted messenger be mounted? by Lucas Blalock offers an expanded meditation on the artist’s twenty-year involvement with photography. In it, Blalock charts the development of his photographic ideas as they run alongside a tangled web of accidents, influence, romance, anxiety, and work. It is a book about coming of age with a preoccupation alternately in full bloom and on its last legs. The volume also reproduces many of Blalock's own photographs and artworks by his peers and influences.
Shaping Space takes as its fulcrum Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin’s platform ArtConstructs. Through this online journal - hosted by Objektiv between 2018 and 2020 - she wrote several exhibition reviews in order to explore the current situation for non-white artists. These texts, together with some new ones, are re-edited and collected for this publication, to examine how we can shape a new space together.
Visual Wanderings by Nina Strand. In April 2020, Objektiv initiated the online series Visual Wanderings, for which photographers from all over the world made art that responds to our new situation. The series ended in June 2021 and Objektiv #23: Visual Wanderings collects many of the contributions.
Making Worlds by Morten Andenæs looks at the works of Lucas Blalock, Else Marie Hagen, Torbjørn Rødland and Tom Sandberg. Not content simply to describe the world, these artists see the photographic medium as instrumental in making sense of the world. Starting from the Icelandic notion of home as our initial world, Andenæs explores the acts of looking and representing as integral components of human development that determine what can and cannot be seen, thus defining our horizons.
Perpetual Photographs by Nina Strand takes as its inspiration the column, ‘On my Mind’, presented in the very first issues of Objektiv, where different people wrote about an image that they couldn’t stop thinking about. For this essay, Strand looks more closely at images, interviews, impressions that are still on her mind. Her essay contains quotes from artists such as Laure Prouvost, Frida Orupabo, Elle Pérez and in this way weaves a dialogue of many voices, instead of making a fixed statement, offering a wider picture of artistic practices.
A Criticism Review is a manifesto where different writers reflect on how we can make changes within the writing community, carving out new ideas about how to work and be published. Contributions from Delphine Bedel, Susan Bright, David Campany, C-print, Lillian Davies, Travis Diehl, Andreas Frei, Tomas Lagermand Lundme, Nina M. Schjønsby & Halvor Haugen, Nicholas Muellner & Catherine Taylor and Nina Strand.