Artospective: Poetry and Mysteries of Nature by Clas Hansen from Norway / Sweden.

From the Brush of Artist - My name is Clas Hansen, and I’m from Oslo, Norway. Now I live in Sweden (but it’s still only 2 hours drive from my hometown).

Since I was 16 and got my first serious SLR camera, I’ve been working with photography as an artistic expression. I’ve done other things like painting and drawing, but photography has always been with me. For a living, I’ve been working as a graphic designer, but I often implement photography images as a part of the design work. I’ve published some photo books, and in earlier years I produced multimedia performances with photo, film, poetry and music. Through the years I had several exhibitions in various galleries.

Even if most of my work is nature photography, I rather think of them more as internal landscapes. I want to create beauty, not as a romantic term, but the beauty of nature itself, in it’s raw and unsentimental state.

I don’t want to take photos of nature, but reflect the force of nature and to see the beauty in that. Freeze a moment of the constant process going on all the time around us.

Often when I take photos, I’m attracted to the poetic and mysterious. Attracted to another way to see and experience the world around me. The camera makes me look into the world in another way. I see, feel and experience my environment in another way than I would by just walking around. The camera is the blind eye that leads me through life. It’s like I become aware that nothing is like it seems to be, and it’s only the camera that can reveal it.

Photography is some kind of surrealism because it creates its own world out of the reality. It is like an image of something real, but it's not real. It is more like an imprint. That makes it possible for me to see and experience the world in another way. I can look at the world, experience it as photography, and see it more as a symbol or expression for something I don’t know what is.