Simen Johan

Simen Johan--an award-winning, internationally exhibiting artist, and a pioneer in digital image-making is publishing his third monograph. Representing 15 years of the artist's career, and gathered here for the very first time in this deluxe volume, are his celebrated uncanny animal portraits, otherworldly landscapes, and psychologically-charged narrative natural scenes.

With a unique creative process that combines candid wildlife photography with digital manipulation, cinematic drama and a painterly approach, Simen Johan summons a metaphorically dense world into being where human fantasy and nature collide. In a catalogue essay, David E. Little, Executive Director of the International Center of Photography, writes: "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."

Traveling both near and far to photograph his source material, Johan can find inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica, or the lava fields of Iceland. He then spends countless hours assembling his images captured in these far-flung locations into a unifying whole. The result is an often-unsettling sense of placelessness.

We see in this collection images of pigeons flocking toward light like moths (or angels); stripes on a dazzle of Grévy's zebras mesh with the fronds of geographically incongruent palms; two hapless caribou glazed with ice, frozen in a scene that is both tranquil and brutal.

Each image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence. Tensions between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is alluring and what is menacing, what is fact and what is fiction, both shape and unsettle the scenes. Johan presents us with paradoxical photographic worlds that echo uncanny versions of our own.

Author: Simen Johan
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Published: 03/21/2023
Pages: 84
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.55lbs
Size: 14.50h x 11.80w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781648230288

About the Author
In his lush photographs, award-winning, internationally exhibiting artist Simen Johan blends artificiality and naturalism, creating compositions intended to portray our experience of the world as a paradoxical combination of fabrication and direct observation. As he explains: "I strive to create tension and confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as beauty and brutality...or the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie. I often feel like I am attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable as I explore the paradoxical nature of existence." Merging traditional techniques with digital manipulation, Johan constructs complex photographic worlds that look like uncanny versions of our own. Johan is a renowned pioneer in digital image-making and is the author of two previous books of photography.


This title is only available via back order