printCamilla Holgren - exhibition
"Don't look now" NordicPub, April 2007. Camilla Holmgren, Artist/ Photographer from Copenhagen, Denmark Educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003. Currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Camilla Holmgren, „Don’t look now” 
I started photographing my younger sister from the age of eleven, because she has a very fascinating face. I did not notice until I looked back afterwards that this had become a documentary project. Her face is neither of her nor her life, as I am the one who constructed the idea of self in the work. I realized the young woman in the photographs is actually a projection of me. I became interested again in the process of photographing myself, in self-consciously staged self-portraits. The work itself had become even more documentary, capturing the rawness of nude bodies under natural lighting. For example, the blue marks gave a sign of imperfection and a sense of reality. I became interested in the convincing qualities of imperfection. These imperfections act as a resistance to glossed over reality, and induce greater contrasts and intensities.
When pointing the camera at oneself, you expose a certain vulnerability and a lack of distance in your work. Issues of identity and subjectivity become much clearer. For me these were the issues of a woman’s own space, a woman’s view on woman. I explored this by creating a specific sense of space, which deals with an erotized space, rather than an erotic body, a space entirely feminine. The interest in space is very much about a bodily experience (as opposed to a body object) and on articulating a relationship between the body and its surrounding space, often an erotic one.
The body is situated somewhere between the visible and the hidden, a semi-revealed object. Your eyes are left with what cannot be seen, the face and half nude body are neither exposed nor protected. What is constructed is an ambiguity, an ambiguous space or an erotic body of space and the suppressed identity of the body itself.
The title Don’t look now, implies a psychological tension, an attempt to capture a psychological portrait of the body’s identity. Enclosed and isolated in familiar places, an almost familiar apartment. But the presence of the cable release cord reveals the activity of the self-portrait, the strong desire to be photographed and be hidden. It is in the very nature of the self portrait, in the creation of a space retreating towards oneself, which frames not only the enclosure of one’s captive self, but also the erotic absence of others.
Camila Holmgren 2005
Camilla Holmgren, Artist/ Photographer from Copenhagen, Denmark Educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003. Currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Camilla Holmgren works with portraits and nude bodies, where the relation between the space and the body becomes a central theme. Often with the idea of the imperfect, enhanced by blue marks on skin, or other signs of imperfection to give a sense of reality.
She has exhibited in Berlin, Syria, Spain, US, Copenhagen, and have exhibitions coming up in Korea and China. She has had editorials published in literary, art and design magazines in Copenhagen and Hong Kong.
When pointing the camera at oneself, you expose a certain vulnerability and a lack of distance in your work. Issues of identity and subjectivity become much clearer. For me these were the issues of a woman’s own space, a woman’s view on woman. I explored this by creating a specific sense of space, which deals with an erotized space, rather than an erotic body, a space entirely feminine. The interest in space is very much about a bodily experience (as opposed to a body object) and on articulating a relationship between the body and its surrounding space, often an erotic one.
The body is situated somewhere between the visible and the hidden, a semi-revealed object. Your eyes are left with what cannot be seen, the face and half nude body are neither exposed nor protected. What is constructed is an ambiguity, an ambiguous space or an erotic body of space and the suppressed identity of the body itself.
The title Don’t look now, implies a psychological tension, an attempt to capture a psychological portrait of the body’s identity. Enclosed and isolated in familiar places, an almost familiar apartment. But the presence of the cable release cord reveals the activity of the self-portrait, the strong desire to be photographed and be hidden. It is in the very nature of the self portrait, in the creation of a space retreating towards oneself, which frames not only the enclosure of one’s captive self, but also the erotic absence of others.
Camila Holmgren 2005
Camilla Holmgren, Artist/ Photographer from Copenhagen, Denmark Educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003. Currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Camilla Holmgren works with portraits and nude bodies, where the relation between the space and the body becomes a central theme. Often with the idea of the imperfect, enhanced by blue marks on skin, or other signs of imperfection to give a sense of reality.
She has exhibited in Berlin, Syria, Spain, US, Copenhagen, and have exhibitions coming up in Korea and China. She has had editorials published in literary, art and design magazines in Copenhagen and Hong Kong.
