Thomas Linder Brox
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While doing research for my photo book “Patagonia” I came across Lucas Bridges’ book “The Uttermost Part of Earth”. It is a description of Patagonia and especially Tierra del Fuego, the island at the far end of the American continent, close to Antarctica. Months later, arriving at the farm where Lucas Bridges had lived, I actually felt, as he describes, that I was at the very end of the world.

Of course this was an illusion – any place can be at the end of the world, as well as at the center of it, depending on point of view. That being said, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, as well as parts of Scandinavia, do have a certain feel about them. Maybe it is the sense of isolation, or being at the far edge, maybe a strange, conflicting independence.

For my own part, growing up in a small town in the northern part of Denmark, has left me with a fascination for wide-open spaces and an unstoppable restlessness, which has sent me out on numerable journeys.

The photographs, presented at Ingrid Hansen Gallery, are from various parts of Scandinavia, and done over a period of 3 years. Looking at Scandinavia as a northern hemisphere pendant to Lucas Bridges’ Tierra del Fuego, I have titled the exhibition “The Uttermost Part of Europe”.

The images fall into two groups, defined by geography and photographic method. The first group is photographs taken while driving through Norway and Finland north of the polar circle. They are all shot with a 6x7 camera and printed from one negative.

The second group is from Denmark. All photos are shot digitally and later assembled into photographic collages by combining numerous individual pictures that together create one image.

In the single-negative-photographs The Road dominates, in the collages The Railway. The subjects of isolation and restlessness are recurrent themes in Scandinavian art, and the road and the railway are clear metaphors for conveying these emotions. In the photographs I explore space, movement and time and the paradoxes that lie within these themes.

It is an honor for me to be able to show these photographs from the uttermost part of Europe in the United States.