Jonas' Julekort - group exhibition

I går åpnet utstillingen Jonas' Julekort, hvor jeg utstiller  sammen med 290 andre kunstnere.

Hver kunstner har laget et unikt verk til utstillingen, og verkene selges anonymt for 500 kr. Alle inntekter gå til Mændenes Hjem, et værested for hjemløse i København.

Atelier September
Gothersgade 30
2100 Copenhagen K

http://jonasjulekort.dk/

The exhibition is open from 10am to 6pm every day - until December 14th.

 

The polish online photography magazine Szerokikadr is presenting my photo work today:

http://www.szerokikadr.pl/inspiracje/201309/hanne-hvattum

Text in english:

My name is Hanne Hvattum, and I am a 30-year-old photographer, writer and curious investigator of life. I was born and raised in Norway, but I am currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I have been taking pictures since I was 18, and in the beginning I thought I wanted to become a photojournalist. I travelled the world, searching for stories to tell, selling articles to newspapers back home – but quite soon I realized that this wasn’t the right way for me to work. I never felt connected to the pictures I took, except from the ones that never made it to the newspaper. The abstract ones and the blurry ones were the ones that made my heart beat faster. The ones that didn’t tell a specific story but left me with a feeling of wonder, curiosity and awe.

Today I see my work more as poetry than as documentary. I bring my camera into my everyday life and photograph whatever moves me. The way the light falls through a window; a hand that briefly touches another hand; a funny looking cloud; an unexpected reflection. I seek to evoke in myself and in the viewer the feeling that life is beautiful and mysterious. That something very familiar can look strange and magical if you look at it twice. That everything we know is still unknown.

I was never very interested in the technical side of photography, my cameras are always simple, allowing me to concentrate on what I see, not on which buttons to push. I shoot mostly with a Canon 5D and my loyal and beloved 50 mm lens. But I also shoot a lot with my iPhone these days. My pictures are often spontaneous shots of something that suddenly catches my attention. And I use whatever camera I have at hand to capture it.

The French writer Anais Nïn once said: “we don’t se the world as it is, we see it as we are”, and this has become sort of a motto for me. My job as a photographer is not to tell the truth about what the world really looks like, my job is to describe what it looks like to me. We all see the world differently, and I believe in the importance of sharing our views. As we learn to embrace each other’s perspectives, we get to see life from a thousand different angles – and that, in my opinion, is the only way to get closer to the truth.

At the moment I am very inspired by the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. She has a special way of seeing something big in something small, and after looking at her pictures I always feel more awake, paying more attention to everything around me. That, to me, is the description of a great photographer; someone who sneaks into my brain and changes the way I see things, allowing me to experience my life from a different point of view.