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The photographic medium can capture, compress, gather and present our (mental) picture of the world. A gallery of photographs can thus produce a context, in which we can look upon ourselves, and our understanding of and relationship to the world, it is precisely this reflexive function, that Jorn Zoëga Olesen employs as a visual resonator for his photographs. His photographs of places devoid of humanity: such as towns, mountains, forests, lakes and zoological gardens, are not just great photo opportunities of a traveller. Collectively, his pictures appear as a naked description and index of nature and culture landscapes, where grand natural landscapes and the wastelands of city peripheries are equally valuable motifs.
The worship of animated unpopulated places has been a prevailing motif, throughout the history of art. Since the classical ages, landscapes have been used as metaphor of modern man's (lost) relationship with the world. Artists such as Casper David Friedrich stretched the human relationship to nature through a depiction of man's relationship to the Divine. Split equally between grandiloquence over the sublimity of nature and a self-pitying pathos for the widening gulf between the cultured person and the "complete" world, which the painted depiction represented as a mechanism to decrease the distance between man and God, paintings were at the same time a testimony to the status quo, but with the added value that the observer could come closer to an understanding of the universal and the existential through the painting.
It is in this way photographic art has been seen to contain universal truths about existence and the medium has been consigned the ability to look past the superficiality of objects to that which is otherwise hidden from view. The contemporary Danish photographer Per Bak Jensen has, therefore taken pictures of peaceful and uninhabited landscapes, while his topical depictions, which at first impression express the same (professionalism) as Zoëga’s pictures, turn into compressed soulful thoughts. Behind this eventless surface lives “the essence of the place” as he has named some of his series, and his wish is to obtain access to the submerged secrets of these places – to find the common tone of the minds and landscapes. But when observing Zoëga’s photographs, it is obvious that he has cleansed them and his discipline of the thoughtful and the romantic. In spite of the hint of romantic landscape depictions in Zoëga’s photographs, for example when lush undergrowth in the foreground indents the focus to the distance – the underlying – there is always something in the pictures that stops one from seeing it as greatly impassioned pastoral pictures. One gets the impression of a distance to the motif, this has the effect of the photographs remaining a naked representation of places, which in spite of their pictorial elements make it possible to see that the pictures are a cold registration only. Nonetheless, recognition of the romantic motif themes plays its part in Zoëga’s pictures, because he confronts our common denominator, that is to say the uncountable pictorial depictions that are centred in nature and the relationship between nature and humanity. A platform for the horizon of understanding of his pictures is in part a depiction of nature, with which enlightenment has filled our pictorial lexicon, but also the uncountable amount of other pictures that surround modern man: travel pictures, private snapshots, postcards, report pictures etc. That we, in spite of this can experience a distance in the relationship to the pictures is due to none of Zoëga’s pictures precisely fitting into any of these categories, but alone stand as purified reports.
The sub-existential relationship between artist and motif is in this way apparently missing in Zoëga’s way to work with photographs. Instead he sees our environment as an organised physical space, in other words, a product of human needs and wishes. With a culture-historical concise view for the narrative structured space, in which we live, our vision and relationship to nature are depicted simultaneously as a historical and contemporary perspective. His photographs bear witness to the way in which we form and understand the world and, because photographs exist inside a larger crop of references, which take the social as well as the aesthetic and cultural historical aspects into consideration. Looking through Zoëga’s pictures certain themes and traits become visible: how does the modern person relate to nature? In which degree do landscapes bear social and historical significance? There appears in Zoëga’s choice of motifs to be a form of overview of the immediate environment of man, coolly depicted, registered and conscious of form.
In the naked description of places investigated by Zoëga there is no form of feeling or subjectivity. This way of working with photographs shows certain parallels with the photohistorically interesting Düsseldorf school, where people like Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursty, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer began their photographic careers. It was here that the artistic couple Bernd and Hilla Becker have taught photography since the since the 1970s and have been an influential force in developing this genre of photography as a systematic and consequent use of the medium in conceptional, purified and unmanipulated pictographic language. The accentuated elements, which are the trademark this school, is not just seen in Zoëga’s choice of motif, but also solidly in the way in which he uses composition and the photographic means. He plainly photographs in the middle of the day or on grey dull days, when the sun has cast long artistic shadows, and where the sun has created multicoloured skies around dusk or dawn. Zoëga’s photographs are therefore often taken on weekdays where he thinks the monotony he seeks is most obvious. It is as if the daily monotony and anonymity has placed a filter over the pictures and neutralised and conformed them.
Zoo and the photographic medium
Where Zoëga’s landscapes are lush and full, his pictures of the zoo have been taken in winter or early spring, where the naked branches of the trees underline the cold discomfort and barrenness. The staged or abstracts of nature mimic the original environments of the animals. From here the animals look out into the horizon, but in reality look at the public – us – the reason for their “perspectiveless” placement in a sterilised cold cage.
Zoëga’s photographs of animals have the same neutrality as his landscapes, but this loyalty to reality does not develop into animation, on the contrary it exposes the photographic medium’s artificialness, so the false quasi nature of the zoo creates a distance in as much as Zoëga starts with the objective “alienated view” there is a notoriety to the motif. Photographs with inbuilt “verfremdung” effect point towards the theatrical in tableaux and there is a break in the pictures, which contain both nearness and distance, in so much as the animals are alive in front of the camera, but simultaneously reduced to spectacles, formed in our impression and thoughts. The almost mummified life that performs for the spectator’s eye has the effect that the animals could just as well be stuffed exhibits in a museum’s three-dimensional picture of prehistoric events. The frozen marginalized life makes time stand still in the pictures and the neutral registration of the camera exhibits the collective neurosis – the grotesque and sad need to keep animals in that form of capture.
In this photographic visualisation of the animal's life that is an iconic expression of rigamortified life, runs a thematic point: both the zoological gardens and the photographic capture preserve the living for the future, detached from the apparent connection. Zoos create the frame for public reaction, education and conservation. Here we can observe exotic animals and here endangered species can breed in captivity. This phenomenon began at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was not possible for the majority of people to travel and see the animals in their natural habitat. Instead it was possible in a zoo to be the spectator of the almost natural. Even though the animals were a long way from their natural habitat the illusionary background meant that we could look and have the feeling of an objective empirical knowledge of the animals. This belief of the uncensored direct access to the animal’s true nature and behaviour can be compared to an understanding of photography, which in its early years had the status of documentary testimony – exactly by a realism that meant one could uncritically accept photographs as a witness of the world – a reflection of the true nature of things. In the nineteenth century photographs were used to accumulate statistical details, observances and classifications to the scientific and legal record. These methods were built on the assumption that one could create a true picture of the events without affecting the situation – a disinterested and neutral documentation, purified of emotional substance. This blindness of discourse and limitation was part of a larger epistemological understanding, and it is the debris of this which Zoëga’s photographs from the zoo play up to. By capturing the dys-adjustments of the beasts he displays the impossibility of placing life in such a constructed frame, believing it is reality. Thereby reminding us of the constructed character of photography and the construction of realities. We are separated from the tigers and bears by iron bars, but we do not just see the animals through fences but also countless layers of meaning, which influence what and how we see and read these pictures. The caging makes us conscious of this medium and discourse-predefined distance between the motif and spectator. And this is the synthesized aspect, which displays how the pictures from the zoo have been constructed in the same way our understanding of nature is constructed.
The medium consciousness that is present in the zoo pictures is a conceptual layer in all Zoëga’s works. The lack of any human activity in his pictures causes us as spectators to lose any natural access to the places. Without human participation the landscapes are on the one hand distant and unreachable, and therefore difficult to relate to. At the same time he achieves the needed distance, which makes it possible to realise the big picture about our ideas and concepts of nature. It is in spite of, but also because of his naked style that his photographs can be seen as an investigation of our surroundings created and produced by ourselves. Seen through his lenses the motifs become small monuments to the way we visualise nature.
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