Anja Jensen – Its for Security

On Anja Jensens photography or on „accomplices in staging a scene…“ :

 

Anja Jensen masters every storytellers goal with a single photograph only: out of nothing and nowhere she is creating stories. The images she takes, reminiscent of film stills, appear overly artificial, somehow magical and the loose ends they depict slowly begin to form a story in the viewers heads. It is like watching a person or a group of people performing peculiar actions in the middle of the night. Adventures one couldn’t take part in during daylight. Out of a hiding space, as usual for surveillance cameras, Anja Jensen shoots the picture from an extreme bird’s eye perspective. A dense search-light is shun directly onto the actors, illuminating them strongly and forcing them out of their secretive spaces. The resulting images seem overly dramatic, uncanny, almost absurd and lure the viewer into a different world. Anja Jensen is controlling the voids and is staging empty spaces so one needs to fill in the blanks with desires, thoughts and personal perspectives – anything that brings you in connection with the places and people in her photographs.

This requires authentic spaces nonetheless. Every staged photograph is based on a real location with people who have a deep connection to the place Anja Jensen puts them in. Jensen calls them her experts for the possible story behind the photograph or accomplices in staging a scene. Like the viewers, the actors themselves filled up the space with meaning and a unique truth – at least for the moment they became part of the setting of Anja Jensens work.

 

Important to Jensens work is that the images are not digitally manipulated. As in Jeff Wall’s or Gregory Crewdson’s work it is not only the end result of the image but also the process that stands in the foreground. The images are the results of stage design and careful observance.