En Amerikaner I Oslo: Fotografier 1962 - 1964.
An American in Oslo: Photographs 1962 - 1964.
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Lost Negs notes:
Miracles still happen.
I mean the kind of "walking-on-water" miracles that make you
stop, breathless with wonder
Oslo, April 1998:
I receive a telephone call from an old
friend and colleague: "I’ve been going through some old boxes of negatives
in my attic and I’ve found a couple with some of your stuff in them. They
are labeled 1966 and they’re from Antwerp in Belgium, I think. You want to
look at them or should I just throw them away?"
Stein Thue is indeed an old friend, in both senses of
the word. We’re both getting on in years now and we’ve also been friends for
years. We first met in about 1965 or 1966, and in 1967, when my Manité
period came to an end, we joined forces and opened a commercial studio
together in Oslo, which we shared until 1972, when I broke out of the
advertising rat race to concentrate on other aspects of my life.
By this time, Stein had also retired from commercial photography, for reasons of health, and had moved out of his studio. One day he had been going through some old negatives and had come across some of mine, which had obviously been left over from when we had worked together twenty-seven years before.
It didn’t surprise him that negatives
of mine might have become mixed up with his: we had worked together on so
many commercial jobs and assignments that it was natural for me to have left
those types of negatives behind when I moved out. But these were different,
some of them from Antwerp in Belgium. So he called me. I was sure they
weren’t going to be of any interest, but I jumped into the car and drove
over to see him anyway. I was curious, I must admit!
Oslo, April 1962:
I clearly remember the moment when I first set foot on Norwegian soil. Well, it wasn’t soil, really; it was a wooden dock. On a fine spring day in early April 1962, after a four-day passage, the SS Stavangerfjord docked in Oslo, and when I finally did get off the ship and set my foot down, it was on real Norwegian Wood!
I soon realized that I was indeed a stranger in a very strange land, a land of different colors and different smells, not to mention the different light. It was spring then, just before Easter, and the light was very intense and it came at me from a low angle. To my eyes it seemed like early morning light, except this lasted all day long. I was used to the clear, dry, fiery, hot desert sun of Arizona, too, the smoggy, humid coastal sun of California, the sticky, hot, intense jungle sunshine of the Philippines, so this was very different. It gave me a feeling of actually being inside the light (which of course we always are, but seldom think of it in that way). I was quite literally swimming in light so magical that it was enthralling!
The smell of Oslo has changed dramatically since I first came here. It no longer has the same pungent, almost burnt odor that greeted me on the dock that day in April. I never did find out where that smell came from. It was like the stench of industry all mixed in with the aroma of roasting coffee beans.
Then there were the colors. The people and the buildings were, for the most part, gray, it seemed to me, as if the sunshine was in the air but couldn’t quite get through to the people. As it turned out I was right: the Norwegians had been inside all winter, and at the first sign of warm weather they had poured out of their homes and office buildings like bees from a hive... But unlike bees, who don’t wear any, the Norwegians were shedding their clothes as fast as they could, scattering them in every direction as their now almost-naked bodies headed for the closest patch of sunshine as fast as their feet could carry them!
To my eyes, this scene was uproarious comedy. I had spent two years in the Philippines, where the people do their best to keep OUT of the sun. In Norway, the people wanted to get a tan - it was the symbol of health and wealth; while in in the Philippines, the people wanted to get a white - their symbol of health and wealth... and besides, if you stayed in the sun too long, you might run the risk of being mistaken for a black person - and that wasn’t good. So whenever the Filipino girls went out they always carried a parasol to protect themselves from the sun or the rain, no matter which, and they had plenty of both. In Norway the people carried umbrellas, and they weren’t for protection from the sun...
So there I was, standing on the dock of the fjord, with my small suitcase filled with summer clothes, a cardboard box with books in it, another with records, some negatives and prints, and my camera bag and camera.
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I had no place to stay.
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So I wandered about town, hungry, losing weight and lost in wonder, getting
to know the place and the people, and photographing - taking pictures
constantly
The idea was to try and sell the images I made, but
the market was very small and very selective. There were the newspapers,
looking for news pictures; there were the news magazines, looking for
feature stories; there were the women’s magazines and family magazines,
looking for stories about famous people; and there were a few other places
that might use general photographs. But there were very few people who
wanted pictures of an older woman smoking a cigar while waiting for a train,
or of two young girls with dark glasses smoking cigarettes, or of two old
ladies sharing their time and their feelings as they placed flowers on their
husbands’ graves by a large, old church.
People liked my pictures, but they didn’t really know
what to do with them. It took time for me to build up connections, and in
the meantime I walked around, lost weight and took pictures, photographs
that were non-commercial, pictures that I took because I had to take them,
because I was burning inside and had been burning since I was about ten
years old. Without knowing it, I was opening doors within myself, looking
outwards for an inner experience.
Each
situation has its very own, unique rhythm. In order to keep time with this
rhythm, one has to open one’s inner doors of perception and let the rhythm
resonate, let one’s own inner senses reverberate to the same beat. Or like
two tuning forks, the vibrations from the one reverberating with the
vibrations of the other as they are brought close together. I can articulate
this now; when I was twenty-four years old I could only live it, go about
with my camera, and touch life.
In 1962 Easter
fell in April, only a few days after I arrived, and I experienced my first
culture shock: the town closed down and the people fled. At first I was
absolutely convinced that it was entirely my fault. But I was assured that
this was an old Norwegian custom and my coming had little or nothing to do
with it. I wasn’t quite sure where the people were fleeing to, but I did
know that it had to be a place where there was plenty of snow, because they
all had backpacks and skis! The streets were empty, the shops and
restaurants closed and abandoned. There was one cafe still open, but it was
reserved for taxi drivers! God almighty, what a strange place!
The outdoor market at Youngstorget (a nice name), the older quarters of the
city, which were then about to be torn down so that new buildings could be
put up, the Folk Museum and the old Østbanen (Oslo East Railway Station) -
these were all subjects for my probing eye and camera. I developed the film,
but with very few exceptions, I did not make any prints. There was no money
for paper or developer for making prints, so I just filed the negatives away
for use another day...
Beverly Hills, California, 1977 (the middle of the night):
Quietly, more silent than the wind,
water surged through the night streets, slowly at first but then with
increasing force pouring into basements, filling the underground parking
garages beneath the apartment buildings in that part of the sleeping
city.
Suddenly, a powerful explosion shattered the peace of
the night and I found myself abruptly sitting straight up in bed in a state
of sleepy shock! On the bedroom wall I could see light flickering from a
fire burning fiercely someplace very close by, but it was not until I walked
out onto the back steps that I saw where. In the street just behind where we
were living an apartment complex was on fire. The fire department was on its
way - you could hear them coming - but the building was already engulfed in
flames.
I looked down and saw to my amazement that the entire
area was under about half a meter of water! I looked up to the sky, but
there was no trace of cloud, nor any indication that it had been raining.
The mystery was solved the next day when we learned
that it had indeed been raining, but not in town. In the hills to the north
and east of Los Angeles there had been very heavy rainfall, with the result
that some of the small dams that feed the canals supplying water to the city
had had to release large amounts of water, filling the canals to
overflowing.
Dirty flood water had then poured into the underground
garage in the apartment complex behind us: cars were floating around in it,
and gasoline from their tanks had leaked out, covering the surface of the
water. Somehow a spark from an electrical outlet - perhaps caused by a
floating car bumping into it - had ignited the gasoline, causing the entire
building to go up as if it had received a direct hit from a bomb! Only one
person was killed, an older lady who had not been able to get out of her
apartment in time.
In all the confusion I had forgotten something. On the
floor of our garage I had left a cardboard box filled with old negatives and
prints, and by the time I did remember them it was too late. They were
soaked, waterlogged, covered with mud and dirt, and completely ruined.
I knew that most of these negatives were images that I
had taken during my first two years in Norway; others were from Denmark and
a number from London, and there were pictures from the Philippines and Japan
as well. I had been undeniably careless, but I drew some consolation from
the knowledge that most of my negatives, my best work, were stored, safe and
dry, in another box inside the apartment.
Oslo, April 1998 (twenty-one years later):
On the kitchen table lay two old, flat,
faded-orange boxes, the kind that Agfa photographic paper used to come in. I
opened them and found packages of negatives, probably twenty rolls in all,
each labeled in my own handwriting, wrapped in green and pink paper. A bit
unsure and shaky at first, I started to unwrap them, but with mounting
excitement as I examined one roll after the other. I was dumbfounded; I
could hardly believe my eyes!
Here, in these two boxes on this kitchen table, were
most of the very first pictures that I had taken in Oslo, those dating from
1962 to about 1964! It was a miracle. All of the images I was sure had
perished in the flood in California twenty-one years before were suddenly
once again in my possession, dry and undamaged. My Lost Negatives had been returned.
Participate joyfully
In the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure
the world of sorrows,
But we can choose to live in joy.
When we talk about
Settling the world´s problems,
We’re barking up the wrong tree.
The world is perfect. It’s a mess
It has always been a mess.
We are not going to change it.
Our job is to straighten out
Our own lives.
Joseph Campbell
Survival is the second law of life.
The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
If you follow your bliss,
You will always have your bliss,
Money or not.
If you follow money,
you may lose it,
and you will have nothing.
Joseph Campbell
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All photos copyright Dan Young 2003 and can not be used without permission
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