It is 2016 and I am turning twenty five at the end of this April. All of my family is in Canada and my friends seem to be anywhere but in Sweden. Why am I here….I have been lucky to find work in recent years that has allowed me to travel and I have done so in an attempt to build a photographic body of work. In order to “get” some of these photos, I slept in a van for months at a time, I worked as a photographer on a cruise ship and most recently, I slept on a friend’s couch for an entire summer in the hopes of creating a travelpoetry book entitled asocialswell.

Up until recently, I believed I was doing all of these things in order to document sights and experiences as they’ve never been seen or experienced before. I believed I saw things differently than other people. I sincerely thought that by travelling to new environments I would be able to capture the world from a different perspective, more importantly my perspective, and that in this process I would find the capital T “truth”. That is up until recently… Not too long ago, as a result of personal nostalgia, I began searching through my archive in the hopes of rationalizing all of my major life decisions.

As I re-experienced these last four years, I realized that I was generally drawn not to the images of my final destinations but the transitional stages in between. These were the scenes taken from airplane windows and ship decks, pit stops and bathroom breaks. At first, I believed these images contained incidental moments. That they seemed more memorable because they were less predetermined. That they captured an instantaneous reaction to something brief and fleeting.

Though they sometimes contained natural wonders, mountains, glaciers and the like, they were always taken in the process of moving on to something elsewhere. The next city, the better wonder, the True destination. As a result, these photos were often captured as side note or a tired but lucky glance and for some reason or another, in hindsight, this initially made them seem all the more unique and exclusive to a specific time and place...

However, I also noticed that my compositions were constant and seemingly, even forcefully, unchanging. That instead of reacting to new environments in a different or original way, I forcefully contained them into unchanging compositional patterns. The horizons found in these landscapes seemingly conformed to an almost constant ratio regardless content or country.

Whether this is proof of the artist’s personal gaze or lack of imagination is up to interpretation. As it stands, Good Morning, Midnight is a selfish attempt to inquire into those moments I once believed were unique to a specific time and place. The images found in this exhibition are thus arguably an imagining, a dream of sorts, of past, present and possibly future experiences.

“I’ll always remember 24,

as the year I no longer felt young”

Douglas Coupland