Simen Johan

Simen Johan—an award-winning, internationally exhibiting artist, and a pioneer in digital image-making is publishing his third monograph. Representing 15 years of the artist’s career, and gathered here for the very first time in this deluxe volume, are his celebrated uncanny animal portraits, otherworldly landscapes, and psychologically-charged narrative natural scenes.

With a unique creative process that combines candid wildlife photography with digital manipulation, cinematic drama and a painterly approach, Simen Johan summons a metaphorically dense world into being where human fantasy and nature collide. In a catalogue essay, David E. Little, Executive Director of the International Center of Photography, writes: “Johan’s photographs underscore the importance of the creative act in photography, not as an act in itself, but as a means towards a conceptual and narrative goal.”

Travelling both near and far to photograph his source material, Johan can find inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica, or the lava fields of Iceland. He then spends countless hours assembling his images captured in these far-flung locations into a unifying whole. The result is an often-unsettling sense of placelessness.

We see in this collection images of pigeons flocking toward light like moths (or angels); stripes on a dazzle of Grévy’s zebras mesh with the fronds of geographically incongruent palms; two hapless caribou glazed with ice, frozen in a scene that is both tranquil and brutal.

Each image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence. Tensions between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is alluring and what is menacing, what is fact and what is fiction, both shape and unsettle the scenes. Johan presents us with paradoxical photographic worlds that echo uncanny versions of our own.