Birgitta Lund
In Transit
SC 22 x 28,5 cm.
Actes Sud 2005
"Numerous levels of meaning and perception intertwine in the work of Birgitta Lund, both in subject and photographic method.
On one hand, there is the theme of her personal journey from the United States to Europe - Lund recently returned to Denmark after living in the US for 18 years. On the other hand, there are evocations of the timeframe in which the move occurred: 9/11, the war in Iraq, the Madrid bombings. The forces of globalization and alienation echo, in a subtle manner, throughout the work. Both themes, the personal and the global, combine and complement each other to create an atmosphere and expressiveness that go well beyond pure description.
There are documentary and diaristic elements in Lund's photographic method, but her pieces are not simply pages from her private photo album; there is a transmission of a collective consciousness and emotion in her work. Some images, strikingly poetic and aesthetic, are very specific: Ground Zero, the Pentagon Exit, the ports of New York and Copenhagen. Others focus more on complex metaphors. The literal and the metaphorical intertwine: no image is either simply descriptive or simply metaphorical.
This series of photographs can be compared to a collection of poems. Birgitta Lund's conceptual work comes out of the vision of an artist who uses photography to reflect a world in which we seem to be permanently in transit, a world where images flash onto our retinas for a few fleeting seconds before being replaced immediately by others." Oliva Maria Rubio -