"DK·Ørestaden 07·14·07" (digital c-print, 120 × 152 cm, ed. of 5) 
 

Text: Anna Krogh, curator/ass. director, Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark

Translation: Pamela Starbird 

Adam Jeppesen’s works have a starting point in classic documentary photography.  As an artist, he records and selects fragments from reality, crops them in a certain manner so that the selected motif acquires a particular meaning.  Jeppesen works with color photography and his pictures function as sharp, sensuous universes that are rich in detail and visualize the world as it looks. 

There is no manipulation or artificial staging.  Jeppesen takes the tangible world at face value, in the sense that his artistic motif – reality – already exists, and does not need to be recreated or staged.  Jeppesen’s world of motifs alternate between depictions of landscapes and interiors, with a focus on atmospheric and meaningful details that are all registered with appreciable patience and calm.  Time seems to be suspended.  He allows places to appear as themselves and the pictures are composed according to the aesthetic qualities that appear in the world – places with their own characteristics and spirit. 

Jeppesen's travel depictions from Japan, Iceland, Denmark and the USA to name a few, exemplify how he finds his motif and subsequently transforms the site-specific into something universally valid.  The modern world reveals itself in Jeppesen’s photographs as places that are marked by culture and human presence, but which also exist independently from phenomena typical of the times.  Even though we have not followed in his footsteps, the places seem well-known and familiar.  The pictures from  Island and Roskilde could have been taken anywhere in the world, the picture of the girl on the wall could have been taken at an abandoned farm on Lolland, Denmark, but was taken in Grinnel, Iowa, USA.  It is not a matter of  actually camouflaging information, but rather an acceptance of the place and the picture of it.  That places remind one of other locations and countries emphasizes the universal character of the pictures.  

Jeppesen seems to prefer pictures without people, where the storytelling is toned down without disappearing completely.  He has a good eye for evocative compositions.  Nothing is too common, no detail is too insignificant for Jeppesen’s camera.  It is as if looking inward legitimatize the work with the photographic image.  Thecamera lens lengthens Jeppesen’s eye and gives him the possibility to get it all – in one picture.