Photographer
How did your work with photography begin?
I was around 13 years old. My best friend and I made a lot of videos every day after school. We would just meet up, film on our iPads, and edit in iMovie. We filmed all kinds of things. We often went to the park and recorded by the statues, imitating their poses. We made fun of everything, it was all a bit strange, and it was great. We could create fun out of nothing, just from the things happening around us where we grew up.
Later, I started working at Holly Golightly, a clothing store that unfortunately does not exist anymore. I think I was 14 at the time. I had my shift every Wednesday after school. My mom worked there too, creating the window displays. I was surrounded by adults who were really skilled at what they did and who had a very poetic and experimenting sense of taste. That atmosphere influenced me a lot.
I started out dusting shelves, organizing, and cleaning. But after a while I began photographing for them. I would put together outfits with the new clothes, ask a friend to come by, and then take photos of her out on the streets. Sometimes with my phone, other times with my camera. The store used the photos to showcase the clothes. It quickly turned into an after-school photography job, and it actually became my first “real” job.
When I finished school I spent a year at a design school in Holte, where I made clothes. I did not really have the patience for it though. The results were always a bit crooked. Fun, but crooked. I often ended up by taking the task in another direction, and focused more on photographing the clothes afterwards instead of focusing on whether it fitted perfectly or if the paper pattern was precise. I guess I cared more about the documentation of the product than the clothes themselves, even though I also love fashion.
Eventually, I began my photography education, which I spent four and a half years completing at a technical school. Whilst sitting with my exam I realized that I have never really worked with anything other than photography and documenting. That was a pretty funny realization.
What inspires you and why?
I get inspired while being on my bike. I almost never walk, I cycle everywhere I need to go. My thoughts and ideas seem to match the pace of biking. It suits me just perfectly. Often I need to stop and pull over to the side to take a photo of something I'm passing on my way, or write down an idea that comes to mind.
Simple things tempt to inspire me a lot. It usually comes in phases, and right now I am drawn to parts of the city where people do not normally spend time. These overlooked spaces feel unusual and exciting. Places with speed and noise, like the medians in the middle of busy roads, fascinate me. They are chaotic and calm at the same time. There is noise on both sides, yet sometimes they feel almost like a walk in the forest, due to the green paths in the middle of the road. Moments of noise remind me of being abroad. It does not have to be a specific country, more the feeling of being elsewhere. That sense of being outside Denmark, outside Copenhagen, often inspires me, because the city can feel small. When you cycle everywhere and the pace is high, it can start to feel like you have already seen it all.
I also try to remind myself that not everything has to be a specific location, whether I am working or just meeting someone. It can be fun to use the city in more alternative ways. I have cycled a lot along highways too, and there is something strangely exotic about that. It reminds me of childhood trips to Italy, sitting in the backseat of a car on the motorway. You do not walk there, you drive. But sometimes you can cycle there, and that’s when it becomes an exciting place to be. Highways are loud, dirty, even ugly, and I like that. They smell different too.
When I first started photographing, I was obsessed with the idea of a “proper location”. I thought it was cool to shoot in laundromats, cinema’s, cool storefronts, or graffiti walls, somewhere clearly recognizable. Now I am more drawn to spaces that are not identifiable, that do not feel like a set location at all, or a place you quickly recognize. The less it feels like a place, the stronger it is for me. And it makes my vision and story come out clearer.
How have you developed within photography over the years?
Not long ago, I created a newspaper where I collected images from the past many years. I called it “Betty Paper”. It was described as “a diary, except it’s not a secret anymore, it's an open book. No, it's a newspaper. But it's not like turning on the TV; rather turning it off to turn the pages of my mind instead. When I started the project, I printed out everything I could find: photos from my Nintendo, my old iPhone, my current phone, my iPad, my computer, all my hard drives, and my entire analog archive. I selected material from years of work and printed it all and hung it up in front of me. That was also the way I created my exam aka. journeyman’s test. I needed to see everything laid out in front of me to be sure I chose the right 28 images, which was the number of images I needed to show the examinators. It felt like a walk down camera roll lane.
It was really special to encounter my life in that way, in print, because otherwise everything is digitalized. Things just end up on a hard drive, and then you don’t look at them for years. But when I pulled it all out and really studied it, I began to notice patterns. For example, I had an entire wall filled only with feet and legs. Photos of shoes, legs from the knee down, sometimes of myself, sometimes of others. I realized I must have a fascination with shoes and with the idea of where people step. That was exciting to discover. Also portraits, peoples faces. A lot of that. My friends, my friends in action.
Through that process, as mentioned, I realized that I have always worked with photography and video. I have always documented everything I did. And that’s still what I do today. I like to think of it as a “Diary.” I find that word really beautiful. When I was younger, I kept journals for when I was traveling. I have some from when I was 6 years old. I wrote down everything: what I ate, if I had an ice cream, that we were going to a museum, that it was hot. That was my way of holding on to the memories back then.
Today, photography has become my everyday diary. It’s my way of remembering.
Tell us about what you call “diaries”
I practise the fact of my work being able to speak for itself, and when I take pictures, I like them to come out as small stories, that I like to be noisy too. I love documenting and capturing the small things people do. Most often, I photograph my friends. By now, they know it well, but it’s never like, “Don’t eat the cake yet, I need to take a picture first.” On the contrary, it’s often the exact same time they actually take a bite of the cake, that I take the photo. It’s not staged; it should feel like something that is alive. That’s also how I see the diary as a concept: something that is constantly in motion.
For me, it’s about being open to what could happen in the moment. I enjoy documenting moments that are spontaneous. I have folders on my hard drives from each year “diary 2021”, where not a moment/picture is too small to be saved. It’s a constant act of documentation. I value it highly, because I know that when I’m older, I will enjoy looking back at all of it. A photograph is really very simple: it’s about capturing something that happened, whether big or small. And that is exactly what I love about it being in the process of preserving life as it unfolds.
Have there been people who have played a special role for you and your work?
I find my friends very inspiring. I feel that we are good at collaborating in Copenhagen. If I'm gonna do a project and need some music, I'll reach out to a friend. and if another is good at drawing, we do it together.
Three years ago, my friends Konrad and Skjold and I created my website together. It became a two-year-long group-project. Skjold drew illustrations for each photo-series, I wrote the texts, and Konrad coded the entire website exactly as I had imagined it. It became a platform where my photos could live on, rather than just getting lost among everything else on my phone.
Like my newspaper, where I’ve collected material from many years, the website works the same way – it’s alive, things happen there. Everything essentially serves the same purpose: to preserve memories and create a cohesive visual story.
I believe in “more is more.” I’ve never been good at keeping things small or simple. I practice making sure things don’t have to be simple – they can fill up the space and make some noise. That’s actually how I work the best.
What is important for your way of working? How do you think the medium comes most to life?
I think the medium comes to life through mistakes. In my world, things don’t need to be perfect, and mistakes are actually something I really embrace in my photography.
I remember, for example, an exam at my photo school, where I had taken a photo where there happened to be a person's arm reaching into the frame from the side. The arm was completely blurred, but the rest of the image was sharp. The examiner focused a lot on how come the arm was not cropped out the picture. But that’s exactly why I had chosen it. The arm completes the image for me. Without it, I would have found the photo rather boring – something you could have seen elsewhere.
I find coincidences to be pure gold. When people talk about taking pictures, they usually think about beauty, but for me, that’s rarely the most important thing. I often find beauty in everyday life in places others might see as ugly.
If you weren’t a photographer, what would you do?
It’s a funny question, because I’ve honestly never imagined doing anything other than photography and video. It feels completely natural to me , every day something new happens, something that needs to be documented.
I’ve tried to think in other directions. Sometimes I envy people whose daily life is going in reading rooms, for example. Sitting with heavy books for hours every day feels like an exotic world to me, because my own everyday life is so a lot on the go all the time. But honestly, I don’t know what else I would do. I don’t think I’ll ever work with anything other than photography and video – at least not for the next many years. It would feel strange to stop suddenly. Photography and video are simply who I am now.
