by Anna Rådström, Art Historian

For several years Marielle Nylander has been photographing interior spaces. The places photographed have not been just any rooms, found by chance encounters, but chosen spaces filled with meanings and relations significant to her. Webs of personal experiences and investigations have been the beginning of every image, every visual narrative.

Now I find myself in the company of some of these photographs. I spend time with them, lingering with each and every one, perceiving them separately and side by side, making up my own orders.

Transitions: quietly, slowly, closely

What am I being told? What do I see? A ceiling. Soft towels hanging under thin curtains. A rim of a carpet against an ageing wooden floor. In a room the sun is leaving its mark, in another, someone (a child?) has scratched a pattern of presence into the wall. Windows and doors: openings.

I know only what I see? I see only what I know?

There is a fuzziness to the images. Surfaces are disappearing in a blur, spaces are being dissolved into a haze. Is this a lack of distinction? At one level perhaps, but it is not the eyes that are out of focus. When I put on my glasses the vagueness is still there and my concentration as intense as before. Is it the camera - the indifferent machine - making the fuzz.

Does the camera know why? No, it is just obeying the commands of the photographer who wants a short depth of field, but by following her instructions, it reveals things hidden under the visual surface. It takes me to domains I would not otherwise reach. "A short depth of field" - the technical term, describing the result of a photographical practice, does not really represent what it implies it does.

Daydreams. The sharp but lazy gaze of every day life sometimes gets left behind. Those are lucky moments. Visions on the retina and behind the eyelid. Hold on, let go, go further. There is no mysticism involved here, only dreams that live outside darkness. Marielle photographs by daylight, no flashlights are allowed to disturb her meditations. The colours live a life of their own, free from demands of what they ought to be.

Softness, but then ­- all of a sudden­ - screaming spots of washed out white blindness. The window does not lend itself to views. Is it a reminder of limitations?

In one text Marielle Nylander tells the reader about her severe shortsightedness'. It affects (of course) her view of the world. It shapes her relations to it. She only removes her glasses or contact lenses in the presence of the ones she trusts and feels comfortable with. "The realm of intimacy", she writes, "seems to be a blurry one to me".

Intimate is close to Intimidate? Yes, in other places. Looking at her photographs I think: She trusts me.

Passages

Interior spaces - I enter. Into what? A house? Which house? Situated where? Can I give a guided tour? I am not sure. Rooms and objects I recognize vaguely and intensely are in front of my eyes and inside my body. Positions: lying on my back, sitting on the floor, standing up looking down. Like the photographer I have been here for a while and for a long time. The images have been formed and are still being formed at this very moment.

Here I am, experiencing photographs, interacting with fragments of rooms, sensing endless spaces that come from elsewhere, that come from here. I am inside, outside and in between them. Every image is itself and something else.   The carpet points towards another carpet and yet another. Texture under naked feet.

I continue.

in MED FOTOGRAFIET SOM BÖRJAN – TVÅ TEXTER SOM LEDER VIDARE (Studier i Konsthistoria 2006:29),

Institutionen för Konstvetenskap, Umeå Universitet, Umeå, Sweden 2006

ISSN 1104-442X

ISBN 91-7264-116-9