Between Sky and Sea

“My images capture what is, and what is real.
An effect of capturing the reality is the lack of predictability. Reality constantly takes form in new moments that never reappears, making each image unique.

To be a photographer is more than a job, it is my way of living.
After thirty years of photographing, part of my everyday life is detecting details, features, shifts in light and nature, even without the camera.
What Henri Cartier-Bresson describes in an interview in 1994 is also my experience:”photographier, c’est une attityde, une façon d’être, une manière de vivré.” (”to photograph is an attitude, a way of being, a way of life.”)”

With her images, Johanna Ekmark wishes to accentuate the beauty in everyday life and objects and in the human nature to mediate what so often passes others by:

“For many many years I have been on an exploring journey with my camera and told stories, taking moments with me home. There has been a lot of roving around, many meetings, wanders in cities and in nature, unexpected situations, and early mornings. There have also been times of intuitive wait for moments which cannot be predicted but which may occur.”

Part of the year Johanna Ekmark lives in Tuscany, Italy.
Her village is situated on a hill close to the sea with outstanding views of the landscape between the sky and sea.
When the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020 Johanna was in Italy. The airline ticket which was booked to Sweden was cancelled when chaos spread, and Italy shut its borders.
That was when Johanna decided to stay in Tuscany, open the window at the top of her townhouse, sit on a chair and simply view what was going on outside.
It was in this way that the first tumultuous weeks in pandemic Europe became the starting point for a creative process and Johanna’s ongoing photographic project ‘Cloud’:

“I have often toyed with the idea to, instead of travelling around to capture beautiful stories, do the opposite: sit in one place, maybe a bench, and await what will pass by.
When the whole of society shut down with all its negative consequences, along came that precise opportunity: to sit still in one place.
I opened my window high above the sea and looked out. A fascinating scenario played before my eyes in the shifts, forms and nuances of the clouds.”

In the exhibition ’Mellan Himmel och Hav’ (‘Between Sky and Sea’), Johanna has made a selection from the picture series which she has taken through her window, and these are presented here as a soft shifting slide show of clouds.
Equally fascinating separately as individual, immortalized moments in time, or as a series displaying an unpredictable and constantly changing drama.

Read more about the photographer Johanna Ekmark