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 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 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.
