Thom Corbishley - Normal for Norfolk

Spanning over a decade of photos, Normal for Norfolk begins at the photographer’s final visit to his family’s holiday home in the Norfolk village of Snettisham, aged Fourteen. The series depicts subsequent visits to the surrounding towns and villages on the North Norfolk coast that the photographer frequented as a child. The series takes its title form the derogatory phrase used to exemplify the historically perceived strangeness and backwardness of the county.

The project began as an observation of the English coast, documenting the quirks, charms and contradictions of the seaside tourist destinations that once boomed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now since in decline. This social documentary approach is fused with a biographical narrative, presenting the photographer’s long and changing relationship with the region and the people he associates with the area. Family excursions, drunken teenage weekend and professional trips capture the nostalgic rush of returning to the stages on which childhood is played out. Pastel paints are sun-faded, neon signs don’t burn as bright and the helter-skelter seems smaller than it used to.

Johann Kööp - Phantoms Among Imaginations

Johann Kööp is a visual artist from Estonia, currently living and working in London. Kööp works most prominently with photography, reflecting on collective and individual experiences with communication in the contemporary world. His work is informed most notably through personal encounters and observations, which progresses into a playful clash of subjectivity and objectivity. Through Kööp’s eyes, we see a world of abstractions and surreal indefinable emotions, grounded to a realm of comprehension by acknowledging commonly accepted beliefs around society. 

Phantoms Among Imaginations uses the empty apartment space as a representation of the mind, hosting scenes of raw imagination, unbothered by rational thought. In this imagined space, the thought of emptiness appears most unsettling. While we let these spaces challenge our imaginations, they propose an undefinable number of options and opportunities. The mere multiplicity of the situation is destined to make one overwhelmed with the potential of that empty space, fearful of a state of heightened entropy. What results is a kind of dangerous emptiness, one that feels indefinable, and eventually reveals itself as the opposite. We feel the space between the decisions, an uncertainty which makes it unable to get a hold of a choice that feels right.

Kööp’s scenes often take form through the appropriation and redefinition of materials relating to home and the urban spaces. Through its strong colours and manipulated reality, the work delves into possible mental complications and distortions of the self, highlighting anxious reactions to everyday life. In its final form, the work returns to the intensity that had once inspired it, becoming reflections of the self which might have been otherwise overlooked. Through this, Phantoms Among Imaginations also brings out the multiplicity of the self, exploring the endless variety of different characters that we might not even realise exist.

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- words by Johann Kööp ed. by Alexa Fahlman

Johann Kööp’s website

Johann on Instagram