Do you hope the viewer becomes an active observer and therefore projects his or her own narrative?
The story is within the viewer. The pictures function differently for each person that sees them, off course. The story is something you make up yourself and the pictures help the imagination. If an individual picture can tell a story on its own, if it doesn't need explanations, then its an interesting piece of work and can be a part of a bigger plan.
Photographic collaborations are quite interesting. How do you both choose what you will photograph?
We found each other cause we found out we find the same things interesting as motives for a photograph. We have kind of the same background and are brought up under similar circumstances and we guess that has to do with what forms the eye. Our photographs are a lot about culture and time. And Sweden. And we share that. And if you do things long enough, it becomes part of your consciousness. It works both ways; you start seeing things and in the beginning its hard to explain why certain things are more interesting than others. After a while its like these sceneries appear more frequently – maybe cause you developed a strategy to find/see these moments more easily.
Would you say you look for deliberate elements of mystery, something to preclude any one particular reading of the work?
The post construction is the narrative work and its at that moment you decide what the story really is about. You have all those fragments to play with, put together to something interesting to look at. The pictures raise more questions than answers so the mysterious part is probably an evident part of the work. Its very interesting with photography, that the medium it self in most cases serves to demystify the world – to show us what we could see with our own eyes. Its something that can be used, to produce work that plays with the idea of bringing back the mystery to the well-recognized object.
All Images © Klara Källström
