Sverres Zine

In connection with Kunstbok Oslo, Sverres Zine is launching a loose trilogy. The three magazine-books are based on stock photography and royalty-free images, originally intended to illustrate something outside themselves. Here they are instead paired up as diptychs, with the potential to evoke a third image in the reader. Or at least to leave something hanging in the air.

The titles are Hun d ser, Om syn and Av figur. The first book shows dogs and people, the second shows people in a dreamlike state, and the third shows sculptures looking at one another. The material is sourced from platforms such as Pexels and Unsplash, and was taken by photographers around the world over the past few years.

These royalty-free images are the same kind of material that artificial intelligence is trained on today to learn about the visual world. Stock photos are made to be easy to find and easy to use, with clear subjects, tidy compositions and keywords that state what the image is “about”. That also makes them ideal teaching material for machines: each image teaches the model one thing, what a dog, a dream or a sculpture is supposed to look like. Images made to illustrate something else end up as curriculum. And since such images dominate today’s content production, they largely shape how both machines and humans perceive and interpret the world around them.

The nature of the book, where the reader always has two pages in front of them, invites us to see entire spreads as diptychs. Through volume and repetition, the books explore this space. Gaze direction works as glue between the subjects, which at best are released from their original keywords and algorithms. When the gazes cross, the images are allowed to mean something other than what they were made for.

Format: 148 × 200 mm


Binding: Softcover


Interior: 92 pages, 150 gsm uncoated paper, colour print
Printrun: 50

Format: 148 × 200 mm


Binding: Softcover


Interior: 92 pages, 150 gsm uncoated paper, colour print
Printrun: 50

Format: 148 × 200 mm


Binding: Softcover


Interior: 92 pages, 150 gsm uncoated paper, colour print
Printrun: 50

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, the filmstrip, a roll of 35 mm positive film, was one of the most important visual tools in the classroom. Using hand-cranked projectors, teachers wound the rolls forward frame by frame while the accompanying booklet was read aloud to the pupils.

Statens filmsentral (the Norwegian State Film Centre, SF, established in 1948) was responsible for the production, purchase and distribution of the rolls to schools across the country, and thereby curated the visual reality of children and young people. The rolls spanned a broad range of subjects, from Norwegian cultural heritage, geology and everyday life to expeditions and geopolitics, as this book shows. As a contrast and counterweight to today’s stream of images, they force us to stop and linger over the selection. First it was SF who chose, and then me.

With the distance of decades, these photographs have undergone a material transformation. Where they were originally meant to capture and document an objective reality out there, both the photograph and the physical roll of film have now become museum objects. The images are no longer a living reality beyond their own frame. They bear witness to their own decay – yet from an era of courage and optimism about the future.

I inherited the image material from Berg Upper Secondary School when the school closed in 2014. I photographed the original film rolls myself, in my studio at the Old Veterinary College in Oslo. The images in the book are drawn from 33 different rolls, with an excerpt of 3–4 spreads from each. The titles of the rolls and the information I have been able to find about them are listed at the back.

Format: 170 × 240 mm
Binding: Hardcover with a unique linocut
Interior: 216 pages, 120 gsm uncoated paper, colour print
Edition: 50 copies

Softcover book

15,5 x 20 cm, 224 pages

Edition of 500

Offset print with debossed cover

Published by Sverres Zine

Released at Gamle Munch, Oslo 06.09.2024

What is the relationship between seeing and taking a picture? In «Sightseeing» Strandberg presents a collection of (mostly) double exposed pictures that explore photography as a self-contained ritual. They are taken over the course of five years, captured in popular tourist destinations like Las Palmas, Porto, Lisbon, Disneyland Paris, Berlin Zoo and Norsk Folkemuseum, or other populous sites like the Ikea warehouse.

The departure for each image is the sensation that the situation demands to be photographed. Following this impulse, Strandberg wants to draw attention to the compulsory act of photography to investigate it as ritual – a way of self-affirmation. Attracted by bright colours, iconic silhouettes or strong geometrical patterns, his camera seeks out the shapes and places already exhausted by the popular and commercial. Moments overexposed on the minds and phones of flocks of travellers, and still not considered of great value in the cultural hierarchy of images.

Repetition and double vision run as themes throughout the pages and underline the interest in notions of familiarity and the generic. Occasionally bordering on the graphic, the attention to surface is further enhanced by organising the photographs in pairs on facing pages. Working with spontaneity, chance and the banal as tools, Strandberg digs into the optical unconscious to ponder whether the gesture of photography can be both a diagnosis and a cure.

Relying heavily on multi-exposure in the camera, the making of the photographs introduces chance elements that contribute to the insistence on photography as gesture. It suggests the over-saturation of images as a form of visual hick-up and finds in this a source of new patterns, patterns that are perhaps more revealing of the subject at hand and the prosthetics of our bodies that the camera has become. Delirious at times, these abstractions bring joy and enthusiasm to the concept of the generic.Hardback bound in linen

15,5 x 22,5 cm

124 pages

123 color photos

Hardback bound in linen, silk-screen printed and embossed with foil

Design by Christian Tunge

Edition of 300 copies