16 september 2024, Wouter van den Eijkel
Finding the divine in the everyday - Interview with Danish photographer Johnny Jensen
With the advent of social media and WhatsApp, few people send postcards nowadays, but for decades, we sent them every year from our holiday destination to those at home. Most energy was spent on writing the message on the back, correctly copying the address from an address book and adhering the stamp. The front of the card was usually of secondary concern, somewhat randomly selected from a card rack offering only a limited number of cards, mostly with a cliché image of an attraction or landscape.
Danish photographer Johnny Jensen, however, focuses on the front of the cards, having collected postcards of landscapes for many years. According to Jensen, the cards not only contain an idealised representation of a particular landscape, but also form our collective memory of a place.
For his new series Land, Jensen added only halftone grids, making the landscapes almost abstract. In this way, he encourages the viewer to not only focus on the landscape, but also on how we experience the landscape. “I invite the viewer to discover the beauty in the invisible and to embrace the ordinary, finding the divine in the everyday. To me, the landscape image symbolises the human relationship with nature, the spiritual and the divine.”
The new series Land featuring work by Danish photographer Johnny Jensen can be seen at the MAXUS101 booth.
Johnny Jensen, land 5, MAXUS101
The series you’ll be showing at Unseen is called Land. That’s a pretty generic title for a body of work, but am I right to assume that you chose that title deliberately?
Yes, the title Land was deliberate. It’s a word that carries weight, simplicity and universality. By using such a generic title, I wanted to strip away any preconceived notions or specific contexts that might colour the viewer’s perception of the work. Land is both everything and nothing, an open invitation for viewers to bring their own interpretations and experiences to the imagery, allowing them to engage with the work on a more personal and reflective level.
In fact, the Land series consists of re-photographed images from postcards from Denmark. When and how did you come up with that idea?
Something as ubiquitous and overlooked as a postcard inspired my work. I began collecting postcards over longer periods of time and a pattern gradually started to emerge— they all contained traces of something greater than the idealised snapshot of the most picturesque part of a particular landscape. I became intrigued by their role in shaping and perpetuating our collective memory of a place.
My artistic work stems from a continuous exploration of the landscape's role as both a visual motif and an expression of the longing for the sublime. The series Landskab from 1996, which consisted of 20 rephotographed postcards measuring 27 x 42 cm, was subsequently retouched to remove all traces of their original context. The result was images that appeared as though they were taken by a single photographer with a consistent perspective on the landscape. I view these images as focal points for something greater than what we see, a kind of encounter with the spiritual.
The original images from the Landskab series have almost all been lost, except for two works and some digital reproductions. For years, I repeatedly returned to these reproductions until I realised that I needed to give them new life and form. Re-photographing allowed me to explore the tension between reality and representation, and to question the authenticity of these constructed memories.
The landscape has been a prominent genre in painting for hundreds of years and in photography pretty much since the late 19th century. What was it like to venture into that genre? Was it hard to ignore that history or did it feel like a dialogue?
Venturing into the landscape genre was like stepping into a long-running dialogue—a dialogue filled with tradition, reverence and expectation, especially among artists who have worked with the sublime and metaphysical, the traces of time disappear, leaving only the pure feelings of unity and states of tranquillity.
Rather than ignoring that history, I wanted to engage with it in a way that acknowledged its weight, while also offering a fresh perspective. By re-photographing postcards, I wasn’t adding to the landscape genre in the traditional sense, but rather commenting on how these landscapes have been mediated through visual culture. My work is less about depicting the landscape itself and more about how we perceive and interact with these images, offering a space for reflecting on the longing for connection to nature.
Johnny Jensen, land 20, MAXUS101
As Henning Steen Hansen mentions in his essay about Land, you’re not ironizing or criticising the cliché imagery, but simply showing it as is. What is the message you are trying to get across?
Henning Steen Hansen touches on an important aspect of my work. The choice not to criticise or ironize the imagery is intentional. These postcards, with their often cliché depictions of natural beauty, are more than just tourist bait; they are reflections of a shared cultural identity and memory. The new series Land (2024-) builds on this foundation. In this series, I have added halftone patterns to the images, transforming them from traditional landscape photographs into almost abstract landscapes. By presenting them as they are, I’m encouraging viewers not to focus on the mere landscape, but on how they perceive it through their emotions and experiences. I invite the viewer to discover the beauty in the invisible and to embrace the ordinary, finding the divine in the everyday. To me, the landscape image symbolises the human relationship with nature, the spiritual and the divine.
Strictly speaking then, the images in Land could depict anything, such as a row of houses or an industrial estate. So, why did you choose postcards depicting scenes of natural beauty?
Yes, the images could have depicted anything, but focusing on scenes of natural beauty was deliberate, as it is something so universal. These are the landscapes that resonate most deeply within our cultural consciousness—they are the images we associate with peace, tranquillity and a connection to something greater than ourselves. By re-photographing these particular scenes, I’m tapping into that collective memory, exploring how these idealised images shape our perception of the natural world.
Johnny Jensen, land 5, MAXUS101
Your work deals with the ephemeral quality of human life, a subject familiar in literature and painting, but not so much in photography. When did you discover that photography is in fact a suitable medium for this topic?
Photography’s connection to time and memory makes it uniquely suited to exploring the ephemeral nature of human life. A photograph captures a moment, freezing it in time, yet it also serves as a reminder of the passage of time. It was during a period of personal reflection that I realised photography could do more than just document—it could evoke a sense of impermanence, of the fleeting nature of existence. Through photography, I found a way to visually express the delicate, transient quality of life, making the medium a perfect fit for exploring this theme.
If time and money were no object, which project would you start working on right away?
If I had unlimited resources, I would embark on a project that explores the concept of memory and time on a global scale. I would travel to ancient landscapes and juxtapose them with their modern counterparts, creating a series that examines how time has shaped, preserved or erased these places. The project would explore the continuity and change inherent in our relationship with the land, connecting past and present in a way that highlights the ephemeral nature of both human life and the natural world.
Johnny Jensen, land 25, MAXUS101
