Simen Johan - an award-winning, internationally exhibiting artist and a pioneer in the field of digital imaging - publishes his third monograph Simen Johan. Fifteen years of his career as an artist is collected for the first time in this luxurious book with mysterious animal portraits, alien landscapes and psychologically charged narrative scenes.
With a unique creative process that combines pure nature photography with digital manipulation, cinematic drama and a painterly approach, Simen Johan evokes a metaphorical misty world where human imagination and nature collide.
Johan travels to distant locations for source material but also finds inspiration close to home; he is as likely to work in a local zoo as in the jungles of Costa Rica or the lava fields of Iceland. He then spends countless hours combining his images into a coherent whole. The result often creates an unsettling sense of placelessness.
The monograph includes doves streaming toward light like moths—or angels; Grévy’s zebras whose luminous stripes merge with the foliage of geographically incongruous palms; and two unfortunate caribou glazed with ice, frozen in a scene that is both still and brutal.
“Johan's photographs underscore the importance of the creative act in photography, not as an act in itself, but as a means towards a conceptual and narrative goal.” ~ David E. Little
Each image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence.
Tensions between what is revealed and concealed, attractive and threatening, fact and fiction both shape and unset these images. Johan presents paradoxical photographic worlds that reflect mysterious versions of our own.
Simen Johan first attracted attention in the early nineties by combining digital manipulation with traditional darkroom techniques. In a 2016 issue of Photograph Magazine, Lyle Rexer wrote: “...one of the first and best artists to invade the new [digital] territory was Simen Johan.”
His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in numerous permanent museum collections. He has received prestigious awards, and Comme des Garçons and Louis Vuitton have used his art in campaigns.
Simen Johan was born in 1973 in Kirkenes, the far north of Norway, and currently lives and works in New York.
Simen Johan - By Simen Johan
Number of pages: 84
Price: €65.99
Publisher: powerHouse Books
