Wells
www.jhengstrom.com
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”
Marcel Proust
It’s an urge and a necessity to photograph what I experience and what surrounds me. It doesn’t matter who I’m with, where I am; what matters are the encounters and the landscapes I have to relate to in my everyday life.
Since I met Amanda in 2005, I’ve been photographing her, our environment and us, constantly. Sometimes it’s with a throwaway camera, other times it’s with a 4×5” camera on a tripod. There is no hierarchy in that, as long as the result speaks to me. My work is driven by my own life, and my strong belief in the truth of what my eyes witness daily. This is a story of a miracle and love, with all its strengths and vulnerabilities. It’s also a story about change. Life goes on.
The work exhibited here is from my new series Wells (Steidl, 2009), which is the third part in a trilogy that started with Trying to Dance (Journal, 2004) and Haunts (Steidl, 2006). With Wells, I extend my use of photography as a means of providing an autobiographical account.
The version presented here, in Łódź, is a sketch. It is taken from the process of making the book Wells. That’s why there are scotch marks, dust, pixels all over the place. But this is where the work is at the moment.
JH Engström