Introduction
The portfolio contains two images from three different projects.
For "Per Pulverem Ad Astra", Eva Stenram made negatives from NASA’s digital images of Mars and let these gather dust in her apartment before printing them. The resulting marked image is a combination of extreme distance and extreme proximity, a simultaneous gravitational pull towards the earth, to the dust around – and by extension, towards death – and a pull upwards, into space, away from the earth, towards the attraction, both physical and fantastical, of Mars. (Source images courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)
For "Birds in Flight", the flight patterns of birds have been digitally rearranged in order to subvert comforting or ‘inspiring’ images of birds in flight, creating new images of birds flying in slightly unusual and more menacing patterns. By repositioning birds so that they appear speeding towards one another on collision courses or arranged in wrought geometrical formations, this generic image of freedom is subjected to the formal constrictions of a controlling technology. The photographs both suggest impending disaster and present a moment of serenity snatched from the rush of time.
"pornography/forest_pics" is an ongoing series in which hardcore pornographic images that are set within or around forests are found on the Internet. The bodies are then digitally removed from each pornographic image. When the 'action' is removed, the photographs appear to depict a space where an event has already taken place – they bring to mind police forensic photography, as though the spaces were the sites of forbidding but unnamed, events. The forest setting complements this ambiguity: at once a place of beauty and danger, of obscuring and clearing – a public as well as a private space.