Photographer Max Kraanen (1984, The Netherlands) is driven by a fascination for the role of fear in society; and explores how fear and threat affect us. He uses a variety of analogue and darkroom techniques to create his images. By stretching the photographic limits he makes pictures that can be strangely aesthetic but often have a darker side.
His latest series, ‘So it goes’, is about the continuous, ever changing fear of something that will never materialize. In a risk averse society everything we cannot control scares us. Terrorism, epidemics and natural disasters are all characterized by their elusive and unpredictable nature. Everybody has a certain fear for these threats, but since most of these threats don’t become tangible, it is questionable in how far this fear is justified. One threat after another dominates the media. The threat expands; it gains in strength until it has almost reached us. But then it recedes, only to be replaced by a new, different threat.
In his installation of ‘So it goes’ Kraanen recreates this feeling of anxiety a feeling of imminent but unclear threat.The pre-apocalyptic feeling of the inevitable that is about to happen, while eventually it doesn’t. It is a story that has neither beginning nor end, only a middle.
Kraanen juxtaposes a broad variety of images to tell a story without a plot; dark, fictive landscapes next to uncanny still lifes.