The universal landscape is explored through photography and poetry in the new book Searching for True North.
2/11/2008 :: The newly published book features a selection of photographs from the Norwegian, San Francisco-based artist Geir Jordahl, as well as poetry from one of Norway’s greatest poets, Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Roger Greenwald.
Earth’s iconography
Geir Jordahl is a dedicated traveler. His photographs are inspired by place and landscape, and his work has been exhibited around the world, from Japan and Finland to Nevada. Jordahl's photographs often show natural landscapes that are stunning but not necessarily untouched by the human hand. As Margaretta K. Mitchell writes in the book’s introduction, “The iconography of earth, air and water come together in Jordahl’s photographs with the artifacts of civilization."
Jordahl often uses a panoramic camera, because he finds this helps the viewer “climb into his landscapes.” As the press release reads: “He follows his internal compass to discover the universal landscape, those places that are not separated by their cultural or political borders but united in their celebration of the Earth and its interaction with human-made elements.”
Expanded experience
The relation between nature and the human-made is a main theme for Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994). This is emphasised in the title of his first collection of poems: Earth and Iron (Jord og jern), which was published in 1933 and has been called Norway’s first modernistic collection of poems.
Searching for True North is edited by Jordahl’s wife, photographer Kate Jordahl. She explains that the poems and photographs have been chosen to complement each other:
- I did not want the poems to be captions or the photographs to be illustrations, but each to expand the experience of the other, she says.
True North in California
On February 1st there will be an opening of Searching for True North at ModernBook Gallery in Palo Alto, California. The book is published by Modernbook Editions, and features an Afterword by Karen Kienzle of the de Saisset Museum, in addition to Mitchell’s introduction. The text is in Norwegian as well as in English, and the Norwegian translations are by Arve Kristian Nergaard.
Maybe Jordahl’s photographs can give us a glimpse of the human’s place in nature. As Mitchell writes: “Nature is our source, not a resource. Turn to nature to learn who we really are: citizens of the world.”
This is part of the poem “Slowly — —” which is printed in the book next to Jordahl’s photograph “Moonrise at Sunset, Great Basin, USA”. Greenwald’s translations are reprinted with permission from North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Images of measureless lands,
sand dunes, bronzelike skies
will last till the eons end; the wind
lifts the little sand-grain onto a stone,
rain washes it away.
Silje Bekeng / The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York