When swallows fly high
The project depicts intimate scenes of summer tourists boating along Norway’s southern coast. The images, shot from a birds-eye view, show candid tableaux of human behaviour and interaction.
The photos are shot at Blindleia, an inland waterway stretching from Skauerøya in the east to Ulvøysund in the west of Lillesand Municipality. Many people, including Norway’s royal family, consider Blindleia to be one of Norway’s most beautiful coastal areas, the ‘fillet mignon’ of the southern archipelago.
Selected works, 2014-2016. (Below: Foreword by Maiken Winum).
Foreword, by Maiken Winum
Christopher Jonassen has photographed intimate scenes of summer tourists boating along Norway’s southern coast. The images, shot from a birds-eye view, show candid tableaux of human behaviour and interaction. In a maritime packaging, the photographic series When swallows fly high reveals more than the obvious. Through viewing anonymous people, a mirror is held up to ourselves, inevitably forcing us to reflect on our culture, values and existence.
This is what we long for. Sun glittering on water and sea spray hitting warm, grateful skin. The fragrance of seaweed, salt, sun cream and gasoline. The cry of seagulls, distant children’s elated voices, the motor’s even purr and the sound of the keel ploughing through waves in the archipelago.
In the photographic series When swallows fly high, we see anonymous people in boats, oblivious to being observed and captured on film. The mood onboard radiates a sense of vacation, of having no commitments, as people stretch out on deck or lean back with one hand on the steering wheel, their gaze resting somewhere on the horizon. This is the phenomenon of free time portrayed in one of its most authentic forms. Norwegian summer idyll such as it perhaps actually appears, but not necessarily in the way we would like it to appear to others.
Using a voyeuristic approach, Jonassen succeeds in creating a sense of intimacy in When swallows fly high. The pictures are shot from a bird’s-eye perspective, at about a 90-degree angle, and show all the details of the various narratives playing out onboard the boats. The hulls are used to frame the subject matter, and with the direct, straight-down viewing angle into the boats, they provide the starting point for the compositions. The pictures, which are almost transgressively close-up, inevitably appeal to the voyeur in us. We can study the anonymous people at our leisure, without being seen ourselves. It’s easy to let our imagination run wild, to treat the objects, food, activities and interior choices as indicators for our subjective impressions of the people onboard. In addition to these social markers, we can speculate over the different constellations of relations by studying body language, interaction and physical proximity or distance.