BEST BEFORE
2016
Best before
Winter in Sapporo is very peaceful and quiet; it is as if the world has stopped for a moment and all the beauty is contained and hidden underneath this thick white blanket of snow. It is possible that a beautiful perfect world exists beneath the snow, when the snow melts away the world may appear completely different. The huge amount of snow in Sapporo inspired me to create this project. The vast expanse of snow resembles a white, empty canvas. This made me focus on certain details amongst the ordinary objects and every day scenarios. I took the white canvas of snow and began to paint in what I observed.
Perfection is in the impermanence; the objects that appear at first sight to be imperfect. With these objects I try to create certain stillness in my images to give some space for visual details that emphasize the beauty of the subjects, which at first sight seem ordinary. My work often explores the subject of how we see things and why we make things look different then they actually are. One of the central questions to my work is: Why do we try to make things look better than they appear to be in reality? Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between real or fake. This is why for this project, I have created my own version of reality.
We do not see the world in black and white. However, my choice of black and white photography for this project emphasizes the surreal reality I see. The snow turns the world white. In winter there is a void of the vivid colours that we see in other seasons. Inspired by the increasingly popular filters used in social media to enhance the perfection of every day photos, I have chosen to add photo filters, used in analogue photography, to these black and white images. These partial color filters emphasize the perfection that we strive to create.