Essay by William Pym

The work of Adam Jeppesen invites thoughts about the origins and the future of the documentary photographer – perhaps social photographer is the word I’d rather use – the kind of artist who does not ostensibly stage the world, but prefers to watch it, then frame it as it is. The only act of manipulation, the only insertion of opinion, comes as the artist’s eye decides what will fit inside the rectangle of the aperture; the rest is already there.

It used to be as simple as that. Modern socio-documentary photography blossomed at the beginning of the last century because it was unburdened by the dizzy questions that confronted, say, the painter trying to produce work after Cézanne and Picasso. While the painter’s world grew ever more complicated, the socio-documentary photographer’s, in its relative infancy, became cleaner and more focused. As soon as August Sander embarked on his Westerwald project, “Man of the Twentieth Century”, in 1909, he cleared a simple path for himself and his life’s work. His concept was to photograph every kind of person living in his small community outside Cologne, and the simplicity of the project gave the work room to take on great nuance and complexity as the years went by. It is art photography that obeys a basic logic, but isn’t small-minded. It grows. And it stands up: Sander’s reputation is as tidy today as it has ever been. A few years later in America – amazingly so considering George W. Bush’s apparent total antipathy to the arts – FDR’s Farm Security Administration underwrote documentary photography of the great depression. Walker Evans and Berenice Abbot had the means to look and look again, at people and places, to create a body of work whose biggest statement was of accumulation, of continuation. Resign yourself to the infinity of the subject matter, and keep going. It keeps growing.

The bullish tide of attitude in art in the second half of the 20th Century, the idea that the artist’s personality was important enough that it should be visible in the frame, meant that the pacifism of Sander, say, might not be fast and fierce enough for the modern world. Take the warped documentary of Philip Lorca Di-Corcia who is hugely popular amongst students these days and molding a few of them over at Yale University as we speak. The flare of a Hollywood spotlight on the man walking down the street is loud and invasive because diCorcia wants to muscle in and refine the image. He sees himself in a saturated, noisy world, and he wants some control. He must wrangle and fight in the frame. If he doesn’t, he will not have left his mark.

So this is one destination for Sander’s freedom, 100 years later. Sanders’ was a working practice without attitude or explicit commentary and, well, that means there was lots of room for the opportunistic or needy contemporary artist to put themself inside the picture and really explore and expose themselves. His vision has been hijacked in a way to suit modern tastes. It’s not a criticism per se, just a symptom of one contemporary artistic mentality. Exhibitionism/confession/solipsism is popular today. Hence it’s lucrative and hence, in the eyes of some, it is to be heartily encouraged.

From what I’ve seen and the few things I’ve heard from my minimal, liminal communications with Adam Jeppesen, he possesses a very different mentality, and one that I am enthusiastic to champion. His is a truer evolution of Sander’s spirit, and one that will prove useful in the years ahead. Jeppesen gives in to vision, by which I don’t mean his grand artistic vision, but simply what he sees around. He sacrifices himself to the apprenticeship of seeing, in confidence that the world will begin to order itself in front of him.

There is no thematic thread, no personal agenda pawing to be let in at the corners of the frame. He shows no desire to be in there, because the fundamental joy of seeing begs for humility and silence. A longer, larger, richer picture is coming into focus.There are no geographical markers in Jeppesen’s photographs. There is no clear text, no giveaway ethnicity or landmark that places the picture on the map. Human characters move slowly and deliberately if they move at all, and they don’t interact with one another. Technology is often present, often looming large, but humans do not interact with it. There’s no palpable enjoyment in that relationship. Perhaps this sounds very drab. Do let me tell you where the action is.

Humans live in a world where they are isolated, flanked by nature on one side and technology on the other. Jeppesen’s photographs show man in the middle, finding a place to balance in this world, a beautiful world: the modern world. Man’s creations and the creature that is nature are too overwhelming, too amorphous, too unpredictable, to understand instinctively. By surrendering wholeheartedly to vision, the artist cannot hatch and control a snappy method of categorizing and capturing the world. But this sacrifice is worthwhile. The only universals that Jeppesen can be completely sure about are light and air, and these are the most consistent, most reliable characters in his work. Light and air suffuse his pictures and have a depth of personality that a portrait photographer would murder for. The atmosphere’s temperament is finely-tuned: in a greenhouse-style travel terminal the air is overcooked and the light is trapped; in the mountain range the mist has a cleansing, restorative taste; above the clean, young city the air is thinner and the ultramodern buildings more crisply in focus. Light and air touch everything; this ether connects everything and everyone to everything and everyone else.

This inescapable sense of a global ecology offers security. Feelings of isolation will subside as long as we can remember that everything feeds from the same source. “Art, or what we call that, you can love it or appreciate it, but you can’t really talk about it. Doesn’t make any sense.” This comes from William Eggleston, a photographer who Jeppesen naturally evokes; he has made rambling, anonymous, wondrous work for 40 years that explains the mechanics of the gigantic American south better than any other. Maybe so, but you can talk about the beauty that the world has always possessed, and you can talk about the beauty you plan to see, and to create. As technology effortlessly makes the world smaller, turning yesterday’s intangibles into reality in the blink of an eye, a photographer talking about anything less is as irrelevant as he is irresponsible. I strongly suspect Adam Jeppesen is neither of these things.

William Pym
August 28th-December 12th, 2005
Philadelphia, USA

Text: Anna Krogh, curator/ass. director, Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark
Translation: Pamela Starbird

Adam Jeppesen’s works have a starting point in classic documentary photography. As an artist, he records and selects fragments from reality, crops them in a certain manner so that the selected motif acquires a particular meaning. Jeppesen works with color photography and his pictures function as sharp, sensuous universes that are rich in detail and visualize the world as it looks.

There is no manipulation or artificial staging. Jeppesen takes the tangible world at face value, in the sense that his artistic motif – reality – already exists, and does not need to be recreated or staged. Jeppesen’s world of motifs alternate between depictions of landscapes and interiors, with a focus on atmospheric and meaningful details that are all registered with appreciable patience and calm. Time seems to be suspended. He allows places to appear as themselves and the pictures are composed according to the aesthetic qualities that appear in the world – places with their own characteristics and spirit.

Jeppesen's travel depictions from Japan, Iceland, Denmark and the USA to name a few, exemplify how he finds his motif and subsequently transforms the site-specific into something universally valid. The modern world reveals itself in Jeppesen’s photographs as places that are marked by culture and human presence, but which also exist independently from phenomena typical of the times. Even though we have not followed in his footsteps, the places seem well-known and familiar. The pictures from Island and Roskilde could have been taken anywhere in the world, the picture of the girl on the wall could have been taken at an abandoned farm on Lolland, Denmark, but was taken in Grinnel, Iowa, USA. It is not a matter of actually camouflaging information, but rather an acceptance of the place and the picture of it. That places remind one of other locations and countries emphasizes the universal character of the pictures.

Jeppesen seems to prefer pictures without people, where the storytelling is toned down without disappearing completely.  He has a good eye for evocative compositions.  Nothing is too common, no detail is too insignificant for Jeppesen’s camera.  It is as if looking inward legitimatize the work with the photographic image.  Thecamera lens lengthens Jeppesen’s eye and gives him the possibility to get it all – in one picture. 

Text: Steidl. In connection to the release of Wake, 2008

Adam Jeppesen’s Wake was assembled over a period of several months in the secluded backwoods of Finland. Taken while traveling on assignment, the photographs document the constantly shifting geography of the artist over the course of seven years. Rather than minister to any notion of Nordic melancholy, the artist reconstructs history into an intuitive, dream-like sequence that reflects the emotional and aesthetic clarity afforded by solitude.
Jeppesen’s large-format photographs are rooted in the tradition of German documentary with its tendency toward classification. This is an impressionistic take on the visual index–one that seeks out the spontaneous and the discarded, the undefined and the uncertain. As the title suggests, the images inhabit that liminal space between darkness and twilight: atmosphere, heavy and thick, flows like a life force through the book, and always manages to obscure as much as it reveals. The specificity of the people, places, and things all fade, leaving light, color, and texture as the only framework, along with the impression that what we see is not necessarily what we are shown.