Helsinki Photo Festival invited everyone from all over the world to submit their works in the festival theme of 2020: Trust, under the following announcement:
Trust is essential to life, it opens up new and unimagined possibilities. Trust is one of the most prevalent topics in our society. What is Trust? How can Trust be perceived in visual language? How can we consciously feel Trust? What do we consider trust to be and can it be regained? Can Trust change our life and how would such a transition affect our existence? How can communities acknowledge differences while building unity? As prejudices continue to divide us, how can Trust encourage accountability and solidarity? As institutions lose credibility, the environment is changing critically, what do people do to build and rely on their promises to be taken seriously? What role does truth play to Trust in friendship, family or love? What happens if you lose Trust in society or humanity? In fact, there are many examples, how to interpret and associate with Trust.
In April 2020 I was placed in isolation under the growing pandemic in the north-east of United States, I found this theme was obvious for my series fragments, and submitted the following:
Trust is an essential part of our lives, especially if we have to focus on other basic elements in our lives than just to get food and survive. If we experience too many uncertainties, we are getting stressed. If too many elements are being questioned we will get paralized. We need to put the puzzle back in place and might choose not substantiated beliefs.
We live in a time with more information than ever before. To handle this overload of information we have for some time got comments as “alternative facts” and “fake news” into our vocabulary.
Added to this information overflow, we had experienced a “new uncertainty” in the form of a virus, in a physical form, transmitted from person to person.
This “New Normal” has been downplayed by some, dramatised by others and led to theories of conspiracy and break of trust not only on personal level but in trust on our society. Will we ever get back to normal or is this the new normal?
Beautification, simplification and selection is the nature of an image. This project uses the photographic medium in its original analogue form to consider the acceptance of an image, and by obviously cutting showing the change.
An Image always consists of fragments, manipulation and exclusion on the presented, and for this project the consideration of parallels between an image and trust is part of the objective.
Mogens Kjoeller 2020
