HOW MUCH SILENCE CAN YOU TAKE?
A photo-book by Marie Sjøvold with an essay by Birgitte Ellemann Höegh
My latest photobook publication How Much Silence Can You Take? (Journal, 2022) contains a series of poetic photos examining what happens with the closeness to our surroundings, our fellow human beings and ourselves in a society where we can opt out of silence at any time. The silence that creates calm, fear, restlessness and insight. The silence that is a magnifying glass for our emotions, for better or worse.
For one whole year I cut off social media and the option to go on the Internet from my pocket. I saw this as a social experiment where I set some rules for myself that I was to follow. Every time I felt the urge to pick up my phone to surf the web or go on social media, I picked up my camera instead, looked around and took pictures of what was in my immediate physical surroundings. The photograph, as well as my notebook, became my way of collecting my experiences. Of documenting and registering what I otherwise wouldn’t have seen if I’d had the option of teleporting to a different social space.
Like my earlier books published by the Journal publisher, Dust Catches Light (2011) and Midnight Milk (2015), this book is also based on my own experiences, but this time the camera is pointed away from myself. The dogma of the project made me look at, and photograph, my surroundings in a new way. Made me try to stop and hold on to the in-between spaces and pauses of everyday life. These non-moments between two events, if we collect them and take the time to immerse ourselves in them, can be an entire life in themselves. The pictures in the book have a suggestive character and focus on sensuality, intimacy and physical presence. They move from private space out into nature. Between the soft and the hard, warm and cold, between strength and vulnerability, the dark and the light. The close and the open. The beauty within the frail. The colour palette of the book changes gradually through its course, through the seasons and the different moods.
This is not a book moralizing over the use of smartphones and social media. I am now back on those social platforms, and I see the importance of the individual’s opportunity for self-expression. I hope the book can be a reminder that we can take control of our attention ourselves. Every time we make a choice, we also eliminate another option. What do we lose and what do we gain? It’s an exercise in being present here and now. An exercise in standing in the silence. Sometimes it’s the restrictions, and the time that comes with those restrictions, that make us see the magic and the love within our daily life.
The book is supported by Fritt Ord, the Bergesen Foundation, The Norwegian Professional Photographers’ Foundation and the Arts Council of Norway’s Artists’ Grant.
ISBN 978-91-87939-65-5
Photography and text: Marie Sjøvold
Essay/afterword: Birgitte Ellemann Höegh
Editor: Gösta Flemming
Publisher: Journal Forlag
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