Text for Flatlands Camp Project: Beyoner at Galleri Peter Lav 2011

In the middle of 2009 Adam Jeppesen began a period of uninterrupted, unaccompanied travel that lasted for 487 days. He traveled on a continuous grade, in one direction, constantly, on the ground, from the Arctic to Antarctica through the Americas.
  
During this period, the artist grew distant from the validation of other people and the convenient markers of cultured society. The long, solitary trip took him progressively further from a traditional understanding of space and time. Only his photographs, he says, became a means of “guaranteeing a present.” From day to day, the camera received the artist’s experiences and confirmed them to him.
 
Jeppesen has become known, over the past decade, for a body of work that is both meticulously edited and nakedly diaristic. The artist’s distinctive style, which crystallized in his first major monograph, Wake (Steidl, 2008), located a space in between documentary and dream.
 
Nostalgia remains important to Jeppesen, and many aesthetic decisions are still made by remembering, projecting and dreaming. The works emerging from his most recent travels, however, are primarily concerned with direct, immediate responses. This need for straight confirmation was borne of human necessity as the artist burrowed deeper than ever before into a dreamlike state.
 
Some of the pictures are far from pristine. Grit jiggling in a box has gnawed the surface of certain negatives, leaving scuffs of evidence on the final prints that speak to the extended physical journey that the work shared with the artist. The occasional occurrences that most photographers will trash, such as light leaks and odd exposures, are allowed to live. Certain shots flirt with total abstraction. At the printing end of the process, Jeppesen is experimenting with unconventional, offhand and ephemeral techniques. The artist is keen to question the authority of the print, the end result, the expected conclusion of the photographic act.
 
Because what is an end result? These works appear to ask what an image is worth, what a moment is worth, and what a memory is worth. What were these experiences? Jeppesen fastidiously avoids the fetishized travel narrative. Location and context are irrelevant. So what was important about these experiences? What is most relevant for this particular body of work, it seems, is the very act of experiencing something. “The Flatlands Camp Project,” which will evolve dramatically over the course of the next year, aspires to become an experience of its own.