Close Distance

Black-and-white photographs made in Europe and Japan bring together encounters with people at moments when intimacy becomes visible. The selection combines older and more recent images, placing less emphasis on dates and locations than on the encounters themselves. People appear without explanatory context, and the photographs resist the conventions of straightforward portraiture. Their documentary approach moves towards abstraction, with joy and pleasure often accompanied by an undercurrent of violence. Attention to people on the margins forms part of this approach to human encounters. An interview and a text by photography critic and historian Birna Marianne Kleivan accompany the images, adding a written perspective to this collection of intimate documentary photographs.