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JH Engstrom
JH Engstrom has been nominated for his book Trying to Dance (2004), a sequence of self-portraits, portraits, landscapes and still lifes made by Engstrom between 1998 and 2002. JH Engström began to take photographs in the early 1990s when he was an assistant to fashion photographer Mario Testino and Swedish documentary photographer Anders Petersen. He went on to study photography at Gothenburg University from where he graduated in 1997.
His first book Shelter (1997) was the result of three years of photographing in a centre for homeless women in Stockholm . The intimate black and white portraits of these women provide a stark and touching account of their predicaments. “I was grappling for three years with the possibility and impossibility of capturing people's presence. It seemed a natural move for me to go back to myself and to start taking self-portraits. I needed to get away, I needed to search for my own identity and moved to New York where I began Trying to Dance .” The publication Trying to Dance is a lyrical and intimate collection of photographs, which confidently blends different genres and styles of photography.
Engstrom interweaves self-portraits with landscapes, nude portraits of his friends with faded interiors. The result is a dynamic and graphic sequence of images that Engstrom considers as his reflection of the tensions between loneliness and intimacy, and the disparities between events and elements in his life. The photographs that constitute Trying to Dance were taken in Europe and the USA , predominantly in his native Sweden as well as Brooklyn , New York . Engstrom moves fluidly between different photographic processes for this highly poetic body of work, developing a sense of the emotional charge of the photographic styles used. His third publication Haunts is due to be published in autumn 2005.
The project continues Engstrom's use of photography as an autobiographical account and includes photographs made from the late 1990s to the present. Recently Engstrom has directed a film about his close friendship with the photographer Anders Petersen (which will be shown on Swedish television in autumn 2005) and has had a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg (26 January – 13 March 2005 ). Engstrom has received numerous grants and awards and his work is held in collections both in Sweden and abroad. He lives and works in Stockholm .
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发表于 2006-8-4 04:00:14
