At first glance, Simen Johan’s photographs and sculptures remind me of the beauty and grandness of the great outdoors. Upon further review, I get this eerie feeling that something dark and strange is going on.
Johan doesn’t use a digital camera; everything he shoots, he does on film. Each of his images come from as many as one hundred negatives. The images are then scanned and put together digitally to create masterpieces of light and shadow. It’s a technique that has been described as “painting by photography.”
“Many of my landscapes, characters or animals don’t actually exist, but are combinations of several different places, people or animals. The process involves using digital tools like brushes, pencils and color adjustments, requiring the user to have knowledge of light, perspective, color and composition, and to have rendering/illustrating skills that photographers generally don’t have.” -Simen Johan
