Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. ‘Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans’.
. . .
We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—abundance, tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, ‘resignation’.
. . .
In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti Christ

The myth of Iperborea tells the story of legendary civilizations collapsed in the cataclysm, known in the various myths of the world as The Flood. As the ones of Atlantis and Uthopia, the myth reminds us of legendary places—a no-man’s land that we are invited to seek and find. It also suggest the dichotomy of the modern man, struggling between desire and civilization.

Through this journal, I imagine stories. It is also the tool that I use to share my reality through images, leaving my mindsets behind.

Iperborea is a mare magnum; an oblivion and a box of scraps; the temporarily absent is the in and out. Through Iperborea, I record my life.

I understand that there is a ranch house for me to sleep in and a man who will meet me once my odometer turns its fiftieth mile from the highway, but these details are inconsequential to the meditation at hand.

Every so often I find myself with a handful of homeless pictures.  These images come about as a matter of process, pictures made during in between moments when the only compelling reason to press the shutter is to be antithetical to the idea that every photograph encapsulates a completed story.  These pictures are notes, tones, mile markers on the way to destinations, things which have caused me to screech to a halt on the open, empty highway, mistakes, distractions from the main event, and studies in composition that likely have no useful thread outside of being pages in a photographer’s sketchbook.  The thesis supporting these kinds of pictures is the notion that photography is a process that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the boxes we’ve become so adept at putting images into–this one is photojournalistic, that one an artistic, and so on.  It is a topic that has managed to creep into a lot of conversations lately, the way a photographer can quickly rise and fall simply by smashing them against some chosen, arbitrary paradigm.  It is like judging a word by counting its syllables or choosing a paint because of its smell.  Perhaps I am getting a little carried away, but I believe that process is important and outtakes–these photographic waypoints—are instrumental in charting our own, unique trajectory as photographers.

Now you have the philosophical underpinnings on the importance of outtakes. What follows are all the personal details from a journal on the process of making them.

* * *

The mile markers tick off the great ocean separating my home in Denver from the island cities of the north;  Cheyenne, Sheridan, Billings.  The shoreline of the Rocky Mountains to the west stands in sharp contrast to the expansive flats to the east, those tracts of land so open that you feel like you’re floating on the stillness of a body of water that has found its own level.  It is beautiful, quiet, grays and greens with a deep blue and purple atmosphere that pulls itself down to the earth like some icy, celestial blanket.  

Keep going north and the names become less and less familiar.  Klein.  Roundup.  Grass Range.  Each one a smaller island, a lower volume, a tonal nuance more refined than the previous.  These are the places where extroverts go to die, where the silence is pronounced like the God of the Old Testament, so sacred, so perfect that its music has no human ear in which it can resonate.  It is not wrathful, rather impartial, Jack Londonish in its regard for the individual’s relationship with whatever he or she has come to understand as the Greater, the forces of entropy, the seasons that slowly turn water to ice and back again, cracking apart even the soundest of boulders, those things that we foolishly regard as permanent.  When the story is written from the outside, these places become spaces into which one disappears.  It is a fair reading from afar, the way that the transmissions from an aircraft that suddenly go silent can lead one to the conclusion that the plane has crashed.  But from the inside, there was never a vanishing, just the realization that our course has always been laid out in front of us with its finality long since a foregone conclusion.  We are already vanished, already come from–and going to–the same, perfect silence.

* * *

It is past midnight by the time I get to Billings.  I have friends in town that I should see, but it is late.  For the moment, at least, I am not in a state of mind to make small talk, to uncloak myself, to give myself reason to forget that I want nothing more than to be invisible, disintegrated, one of the vanished.  I get a room on the east edge of town, sleep until sunrise, and continue north into the deeper sea of Montana as it teeters over the steep threshold of winter. I know where I am going–it is the third time I have been in the area in less than a year.  The Missouri River Breaks, a place where the land itself seems to vanish from the vast plains, slipping downward in relief as though mountains have been punched into the ground rather than sprung up from it.
 
I turn the car from the two-lane onto a gravel strip extending in a straight line eastward, out over the horizon.  Behind me is one of the buttes of the Little Rockies, a mountain-looking outcropping with an appearance made all the more pronounced by the fact that it is surrounded by the downward breaks and the flat, open country.  I am headed interior, into the rural heart of Phillips county, sixty miles or so.  The road is relatively kept, but rain turns the clay substrate into a slick mud that has the consistency of toothpaste and the viscosity of Valvoline.  It has been raining all afternoon, but what the hell. I have got a sleeping bag and water in the back of the car and the worst-case scenario is not all that bad.

I have been sent to photograph buffalo but, I will confess, it is the furthest thing from my mind as the car clicks tracks along its rocky course. For me, Montana has always been a love story, a point on the map where the useless tools of reason and rationale disappear into the sky like millions of little starlings migrating gracelessly into the blue-grey ether above. I understand that there is a ranch house for me to sleep in and a man who will meet me once my odometer turns its fiftieth mile from the highway, but these details are inconsequential to the meditation at hand. I have become wisps of stratospheric cloud and the road ahead of me presents only the illusion of choice.  I could not drive it any different if I tried.

Off the Grid.
Ingar Aasen calles himself the Art Ranger and is today an established artist, both in Norway and on the west coast in America. He was born in Fredrikstad, Norway in 1964 and has been living in a communal area called Øra, just outside Fredrikstad City, for the last twenty years. It used to be a sparsely populated area, a nature reserve and a sanctuary for migrant birds. Through the years, a recycling factory was built and large industries have gradually been established. Ingar lives off-the-grid, without electricity or water, in an encampment of old Russian army trucks, camping wagons and old tour buses that he calls The Art Ranger Camp.

Driven by desire of freedom and control of his own life, Ingar does not want to be a part of the system. He does not pay taxes to the government and avoids obligations towards society. Ingar’s vehicles are all without license plates and he does not have a drivers license. Ingar has been involved in six public protests, often in front of government buildings in Oslo, including the Royal Palace, where marches against censorship to demonstrate his strong belief in freedom of expression.

“I am too free for society” —Ingar Aasen

Even though, Ingar questions authority, he does not want to have a negative relationship with the police, nor the communal officials. Rather, he would appreciate cooperation without any formal contract. Looking back at Ingars history with authorities, I found that despite his confrontational and offensive performance art demonstrations, none of them have led to either imprisonment or fines. Rather, they resulted in informal talks over a cup of coffee at the police station.


Finding meaning.

Growing up in Fredrikstad was a troublesome upbringing for Ingar. He did not find much meaning in living life within the conventional boundaries, where one finds limited room for individuality, creativeness or extraordinary means of expression. Since Ingar was a child, he refused to learn how to read the clock. Years later, he discovered Salvador Dalí, and his iconic surrealistic watches in his paintings; these watches symbolized a time Ingar could relate to.

As a young man, Ingar spent many frustrated years resorting to alcohol, drugs and violence. Throughout the years, he transformed disappointment and anger about his upbringing into creativeness and freedom of expression through art. He became the Art Ranger.

He is a ranger for the arts and a true defender for the people that are treated as outsiders in society.

About four winters ago, Ingar found several Roma Gypsy families sleeping beneath tarpaulins and garbage to endure the freezing winter nights in Fredrikstad. These families were living on the edge of survival. This was an unacceptable condition for anyone to be in, so he invited them to come and live together with him in the Camp. During their stay, the Romas coexistenced with Ingar.

“The society has created the illusion of time, and by being part of it, you will be living with a death-watch ticking on your wrist.” —IA

In 2007, a conservative party was elected into office in Fredrikstad. Since the Roma Gypsy families moved in to the Art Ranger Camp, Ingar Aasen has experienced reoccurring negative attention from the conservative governing local party. Charges have been made against them for various reasons; a colony of people living on public land, no sewage or sanitary systems installed, stealing from the local garbage dump etc. etc. But to Ingar, enforcing displacement and homelessness are not a sustainable solutions for the Roma Gypsies or the Norwegian government.

Eventually, the mayor campaigned to dismantle the Art Ranger camp. The obvious charge was Ingar Aasen’s occupation of public land; littering the area with scrap materials and other undesirable objects—art objects if you were to ask the artist. Debates concerning demolishment of the camp went on locally. In 2010, a final sentence was given, forcing the Roma Gypsies to leave the camp immediately, and Ingar to demolish the camp within a couple of weeks.


Ingar chose to continue his creations by evolving them into other forms. So, rather than demolish them, he will reform the structures and build an expressive art installation.

“Where will you go?”, I ask.

“Up”, answers Ingar.

I don’t know with what sweetness our native land draws us to it,
and won’t let us forget. —Ovid

Natale Solum is a series of photographs about Poland, where I was born and lived as a child, before leaving for New York City. I returned to Warsaw only some 20 years later. These photos are about the country I have been discovering since then.

The title is taken from a verse by Ovid, and it translates, roughly, to “Native Soil”. The phrase is part of the following line: “nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui”, which means, with some poetic license, “I don’t know with what sweetness our native soil draws us to it, and will not let us forget.”

The topics I am highlighting pertain to the country’s cultural identity–World War II, communism, religion, Poland’s integration into the European Union, age, gender, class, education, and politics. I have also documented more prosaic subjects, like Poland’s harsh winters, and less tangible topics, like the melancholy that often hangs in the air in Poland, especially during the cold season.

A work in progress, this series of images forms the early chapters of what I hope will grow into a longer narrative.

As a woman photographing men dressed as women, I was
doubly aware of the surrealism involved.

From 1995 through 2001, I worked as a Tarot-card Reader at Lucky Cheng’s, an East Village restaurant that employs transgender waitresses and drag performers. I was also able to document some parts of the lives of the people who surrounded me. The waitresses and performers became friends; they allowed me to photograph them both “on” and “off”. There was mutual trust.

As a woman photographing men dressed as women, I was doubly aware of the surrealism involved. It made me question what I used to take for granted, about appearances and what constitutes gender.

Over the past year, I have travelled to countries and regions affected by the Arab Spring to document the hopes and dreams of the people that aspire for a better and, dare I say, fairer future.

My journey began in Tunisia. The Libyan war had just started, meanwhile, refugee camps were being set up in Al Choucha near the Lybian border for those fleeing the conflict. This was my first taste of what was a direct consequence of the uprising against the Gaddafi regime.

From there, I visited Morocco. At the time, the country was voting on a referendum to accept the proposed changes to the constitution as put forth by the King of Morocco. Despite protests demanding more ‘real’ changes, the answer was a resounding “yes”.

Afterwards, I went to Egypt, where I was confronted with a waining revolutionary movement and disillusion. “We have fought the concrete enemy, now we must fight the enemy within,” someone had told me in Tahrir hinting towards the revolution’s dismantling spirit at the time. The people of Egypt, however, were tired. They wanted life to resume without protests and distractions.

It felt like a volcano ready to erupt at the hint of anything that would jeopardize the revolution’s demands —Alexandros Demetriades

Soon after, I went back to Tunisia to cover the first democratically held elections. The mood was wonderful and people where more than excited about their country’s future. They were the first in the region to have made it this far . The Tunisian economy is still in disarray and the revolution has done little so far to elevate the people’s lives there.

I returned to Egypt to cover the Egyptian elections. People were hopeful that the worst was behind them. It felt like a volcano ready to erupt at the hint of anything that would jeopardize the revolution’s demands—requiring the army to step aside and cede power to an elected civilian authority. Things often spiraled out of control and clashes ensued killing dozens of people.

A year has passed since the first clashes in Cairo in January 25, 2011 erupted, which eventually led to the overthrow of the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. What was to be the celebration and homage to the martyrs that so willingly gave up their lives for the sake of democracy turned out to be a different reality altogether. Even though the general consensus amongst the people was that the army had to step down, the rise of the Islamists who controlled 70% of the votes in the newly elected parliament presented a new force in the political life of the country. Tahrir—the heart of the revolution—was split in two: on one corner the Islamists celebrated their parliamentary victory and forged an alliance with the army; opposite to them were the liberals, who were marginalized by the results trying to find their place in the new emerging political life of the country.

People have made it clear that their voices will not be silenced any longer. Blood that was spilled in the name of democracy must now begin to ‘mean’ something in the eyes of those that have survived and bear the scars of the recent past. The long and hard battles fought and won are but one piece of the democratic puzzle. All must now face the realities of what this change could mean and the reconciliations that need to be made to make it work.

Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have each reached the point of no return. It will be a difficult  and prolonged road with many uncertainties that has only just begun.

“Bei, born in Xi’an China, was striving to break through the barrier of classic French ‘couturier’ with her colorful designs and an Asian twist.”

Making one’s way into the limelight of the fashion industry in Paris has not changed since Coco Chanel sought support from members of the wealthy bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century. I took these photos in 2006 at a small, by invitation only, fashion show in the apartment of a well to do French family. The building was located a stone’s throw away from the Champs Elysees. The Monsieur who hosted the event at his private residence had an eye for the work of Bei, a young Chinese fashion designer who had studied in Paris. Her work was and still is symbolic of a crossover between European and Asian design.

In this series, I document a community whose members devote massive energy to strengthening and displaying their bodies. Rigorous and exciting competitions determine who has the most perfect physique. Line up, walk, display, flex, and judge. These men and women march across a well-lit stage, stop midway and expose sculpted bodies, the product of perseverance and hard labor.

Bodybuilders use weightlifting, diet, tanning, and oils to pursue highly specific results. Their appearance might seem exaggerated or strange to people from the outside world, but within the bodybuilding community, inflated biceps and over-sized chests represent beauty. However, with this allure comes a demand for lifestyle sacrifices and arduous workouts.

Training for competitions is a year-long process and almost a full-time job. Bodybuilders work out six or seven days of the week for three to four hours a day. Contestants follow extreme and highly-regimented diets prior and subsequent to the competitions. Cooking and grocery shopping are often time-consuming, as some routines call for eight meals a day. Bodybuilders struggle to balance their life, which includes training, jobs, families, and sleep. Regardless, many participants relish the experience of being onstage and setting new goals for themselves at every competition. They describe competitions as euphoric. Even though performing and having one’s body scrutinized can be nerve-wracking, the attention bodybuilders receive is highly gratifying, especially for the winner.

As a photographer, I am interested in capturing the tradition of bodybuilding, and the competitive, robust nature of the shows. My series aims to bring viewers closer to this insular and ritualistic community. In the process, I hope to raise questions about the sacrifices we all make in pursuing our ideals.