Title: Sexual Joy Through Self-Hypnosis

Photographer/s: Kristine Jakobsen

Date of publication: 05.02.2011

Place of publication: Oslo, Bergen Norway

Dimensions: 20,5 x 26 cm

Edition size: 500

Type of binding: Hardcover

Number of pages: 60

Type of paper: MUNKEN LYNX 150g/m2

Number of pictures: 52

Type of printing: color

Printer: Uab Balto Print, Lithuania

Publisher: Tellé www.tellerecords.com

Designer: Kim Hiorthøy

Language: english

ISBN: 978-82-998569-0-4

Category: Artist book

Price: $47 USD

Summary: The camera needs to be an extension of your eyes, a sublime translator of the moment into one frame which sums up everything seen into a sublime entity that turns the rest of the moment, may it be one second, ten or a day, superfluous. We use video or transcripts of experiences into words as methods for grasping the full moment, still they are not sufficient as to translate the whole experience. A recording of a sound from the moment might be an excellent method of recalling the moment, on a personal level by the recorder, but is only pure fiction of the senses for someone outside of the experience recorded, and if the subject in matter doesn’t have the gift to visualize internally – nothing. So photography is basically the only method of grabbing essence, and so the most essential tool for summing up has turned democratic. Only ten years ago photography was purely exclusive, in the sense that a «good» picture or a «bad» picture was defined by the photographer, or should I rather say the human being behind the camera. With social medias, and so the total democratization of photography and the means of publishing it (some might call this visual anarchy), the exclusivity of taking an excellent picture is truly defined by each and every individual. There has been a long while since masters of documentary photography has been able to create pictures like «The Girl In The Picture», the picture that almost alone turned the tides against the war in Vietnam, by that napalm-burned child running toward the camera arms outstretched. A snapshot. Quantity in the media has a way of obscuring the icons which could have been created. With inflation symbols turn obscure and lose their power. This is a pessimistic approach, but still there is a way out. To turn to the sublime. Kristine Jakobsen does this and it`s hard to see how or to explain why, but she does. The method can not be summed up onto one A4 paper. One would think that the way of breaking with the dominating tendencies of todays photography would be to put yourself above everyone else, or taking a distance to the world we in fact live in, which has turned more and more virtual, and that method is fine but not substantial. What Jakobsen does is to grab the honest methods of the amateur and tilting it, perfecting it by making it more obscure, and such ending up making it sublime. That is a gift. Not for the artist/the photographer/the human being shutting the mirror, but a gift to us. It`s a way of deleting the borders between harmony and disharmony and ending up revealing a lurid beauty which again underlines how fragile existence is while still confronting it. The essence of photography has always been existential and not material. Photography has never been labor, or labor in photography has always stretched for manipulation. In a very few photographers I see this need for catching the imperfect moment inside a perfect moment, like the picture has been shot in the moment of a migraine attack, where fog enters your field of vision, but it`s not part of your reality. The colors changes hue, but you`re the only one seeing it… Her pictures are almost color blind, and very seldom concrete. In that sense they are ultimately undone, and so can live on forever. Like that last page of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering genius, a book of fiction that is not fiction, a self biography that is not a self biography, by a writer which is not a writer, of that amazing moment where the frisbee obscures the sun, on the last page of the book. Just for a moment. A fraction of time. Jakobsens photographs are not photographs, they are moments without being moments, they are lingering in insecurity. Redefining what is and isn’t while still not being pretentious or ambitious enough to die, by trying to define anything. They can not be boxed. Her pictures are weak and fragile, but when we`re weak we`re strong, and attacking them would be like attacking a child. I never met a naive child. I see the child behind her eyes. By turning dullness into entertainment our possibilities to live is almost infinite. It`s about never turning blind.

Date and place of birth of photographer/s: Nov 18, 1977

Website: www.kristinejakobsen.com

Book link: www.robotbutikken.noi

Donated by: Tellé and Kristine Jakobsen