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Andreas Olesen
(b. 1981)
"When I am in the role of traveler, there is nothing I like doing more than standing alone in a foreign place, invisible," says Andreas Olesen, the Danish born photographer. "I can stand there, lost to the world I know, and simply absorb life as a varied and sprawling web encompassing so many things."
Andreas Olesen, has spent his life between the San Francisco Bay Area and Denmark. He studied photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work displays a juxtaposition of several classic photographic styles, primarily landscapes, but also influenced by photographic collages, the historical camera obscura process, and narratives. This union of styles brings a new and personalized meaning to the landscape photograph. The synthesis of memory, aesthetic, and format come together to imbue the piece with some of the impressions he had of each place he photographs. Leaving behind the usual unity of format in a body of work, there is space to construe a unique vision for each photograph and explore the complex relationships between a photographer and a space being photographed.
Many of his photographs are taken while walking aimlessly, and at the moment are intuitive, almost reflexive. His photographs are usually straightforward, composed in a simple format and they celebrate quiet moments, reflections and unnoticed aesthetic enjoyments. Other times he stops and thinks, looks again, and ponders an imaginary final image. These pictures are constructions, meaning that they are composed almost in sections; a triad consisting of current impression, aesthetic choice, and format coming together to establish the final image. Olesen is presenting photographs that either capture moments as they seem and for their inherent value, or is capturing a constructed impression of a scene.
Sometimes a memory or impression lasts only on an aesthetic level, and within those photographs it is virtually impossible to get an impression of the larger space or a bearing on the location. They are specific shapes, forms, light and/or contrast, duly photographically reproduced with the format helping accentuate the aesthetic nature of the photograph. In other cases, the expansive and fragmented memories are reality remembered. These photographs lean more towards classic landscape photography, but are injected with a personalized aesthetic to direct the viewer towards the feeling of memory and a sense of time. With the loss of focus to accentuate color and light, or the fragmentation of a space to evoke not just his recollection of places and things, but a general feeling of new space, of being outside of home, a way to remember losing your breath.
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