FAR TOO CLOSE — STEIDLMACK (2008)
In Far too close, the photographer Martina Hoogland Ivanow is playing with the idea of distance in a geographical and a emotional manner; to the person, the object, the landscape and fundamentally to herself as the photographer.
The book explores two seemingly opposite positions of proximity – through the experience of closeness and distance. An investigation into the relationship to travel and return to a home. Portraits of her family are layered by interior photographs and landscapes conjuring feelings of heritage, social place and background. Together they underscore the relational and constructive aspects of the family and how we are either identified or alienated within it.
The photographs have been taken during a period of seven years and includes journeys to Siberia, Sakhalin Island; north of Japan, Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of Argentina and the Kola Peninsula in Russian Lappland. These contested places have been chosen because of their shared dark history and ability to absorb experience of what is unknown or uncomfortable at the ends of the earth.
Martina Hoogland Ivanow is recognized internationally for her dark mesmerizing aesthetic., conveying in her subjects a heighten presence as real as it is poetic.Her photographs have been featured in Another Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Big magazine, Blindspot and exhibited at Moderna museet (Stockholm), The Barbican and The V & A Museeum (London), Brandts Museet for fotokunst (Denmark). Born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973, she studied photography in Paris and New York, after a few working years in London she currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden.