How does one summarize a practice spanning nearly two decades?

Write about ebb, flow, and Google. Palm trees backlit by the sun. Buttercups and cow parsley becoming the cosmos. Slumbering snow-covered winter landscapes. Northern lights. Nightly walks to a chosen location with sleepy children in your arms.
Write about travels. Along the local roadside. To Finland. To the ends of the earth. The ever-growing mass of nature images that numbs us.
Write about the visual perception and the dissolution of the static surface of photography. Mental snapshots and physical pictures. Objects born from photography, but that have become something of their own kind, free from categorization. All testify to short excerpts of events, in actual places, at a certain time. Moments from a shared practice, a shared life. What is now also their children’s reality.

The Violent Power of Photography

The photographic medium possesses a violent power. Photography creates beauty, but it can also consume the nature it depicts—like the generic image of a palm tree at sunset that has adorned printed calendars, beach towels, and posters since the 80s. Consumed by popular culture, the motif became so saturated that it still tends to touch on kitsch aesthetics. As a result, viewing an actual palm tree at sunset can seem trivial to someone who has seen too many reproduced depictions. The motif is too reminiscent of a photograph.
In their lens-based practice, Inka and Niclas Lindergård recurrently delve into the realm of the overly consumed portrayals of nature. Throughout their work, the artist duo has investigated the mechanics of vision and our relationship with nature as depicted through the camera lens. Despite classical training in the photographic medium, there is a constant urge to challenge its conventions, to playfully explore what photography can be in the encounter with new materials and forms. Today, photography and the photographic gaze have become so prevalent that most of us now possess a developed visual perception. We know at increasingly younger ages when the lighting conditions are optimal for a certain type of image, or from which angle a landscape is most ideally depicted. With the help of digital platforms, nature photographs are consumed in a way never before seen. We have access to innumerable sunsets, seascapes, and depictions of the most magnificent northern lights—to the extent that the eye becomes saturated with the heightened beauty. The abundance simply numbs us. How does this affect our perception?

Heightened Nature in Spin

4K Ultra HD

The representation of nature has varied across different times and cultures. A common theme in many of these depictions is that flora and fauna are often seen as part of something divine. This is especially true in contemporary secular Swedish society, where nature is attributed almost healing and religious qualities. David Thurfjell, professor of religious studies, argues that our secular societal development is leaning towards defining religion as a space for profound existential experiences. Given this definition, nature becomes the place where many Swedes feel they connect with an existential dimension.
With the understanding of nature’s elevated status as the obvious place for existential reflections among the majority of Swedes, it’s not hard to imagine that the work of Inka & Niclas might provoke. Through their lens-based practice, they depict a handcrafted manipulated image of this, in many eyes, sacred sphere. Do we have the right to exalt something that is already sublime? The artists are well aware that they move on the border between the (heightened) beauty and the point where it can tip into absurdity. At the core is a genuine interest in the aesthetics of popular culture and its impact on our perception of nature.
Enhancing the most natural thing we can imagine—nature itself—can be seen by many as a somewhat offensive act. The clearly altered color scales in Inka & Niclas’s series of works (manipulated during exposure, it should be noted) can be unsettling because they remind us that we are part of the very same movement. Most of us can likely catch ourselves beautifying, filtering, and removing the drab color scales from images. We simply adapt the representation of nature to suit our own saturated tastes.

The slumbering calm that falls over a winter landscape in dawn light. Its snow-covered trees (could they be birch and pine?) seem heavy, as if in a resting state. A delicate shimmer rests over the motif. Hubba Bubba and sickly-sweet rosé wine. A landscape view in color schemes so elaborate they must be manipulated. A depiction of a heightened nature in spin.

The title 4K Ultra HD refers to the terms 4K and Ultra High Definition used to describe the resolution and pixel density of digital screens. The increasingly superlative terms depict a rampant development of the digital screen’s image quality. It can be seen as an expression of our time’s aim for a visually elevated presence. The same type of striving for an enhanced reality is, according to author and journalist Maria Stepanova, embedded in the DNA of photography. According to her, photography is not primarily intended to preserve the real. Despite its documentary qualities, its logic is more like when people prepare a little package for the survivors, or compile messages for extraterrestrials: a few things that distinguish humanity, an anthology of the best we have, an attempt to describe ourselves by listing a few highlights, Shakespeare – Mona Lisa – the cigar – penicillin – Kalashnikov. When search algorithms list Internet’s most popular images in descending order, the top categories that we tend to download are those images of a deceiving beauty. Whether a digital image portrays the subject truthfully or not is irrelevant.
Despite many of the motifs in the 4K Ultra HD series being confusingly similar to generic nature views, the artist duo could not use that type of ready-made images in their work. For them, photography has a connection to a physical place and event. What is depicted must have taken place in front of the camera lens. Even though the body has increasingly disappeared from the image, it is still present in their work. The perspective in the early photo series Watching Humans Watching from 2008—where people look at magnificent nature views—has shifted from observing others to a concentrated studying of their own photographic gaze. Inka & Niclas’s work is not primarily driven by exploration—they do not want to report, nor seek definitive answers to given questions. Instead, the artist duo depicts their participation in the viewing of nature that they previously have also pointed out in others.
The series also consists of sculptural elements—sharply cropped excerpts from photographs that have emerged from the two-dimensional and become amorphous shapes. The dissimulation of the image reaches yet another dimension in the meeting between the photograph and the print surface—hand-sculpted and softly curved plasters. Dipped in a dissolved fluid version of the photograph, the irregular plasters further abstract the motif. This procedure is rooted in a sensory exploration that must be liberated from the initial conceptualization that once sparked the process. What follows is a profound investigation into the material.

The Shared Journey as Ritual

Family Portraits

Although the body has disappeared from the image, it asserts itself more clearly in other forms and materials. The series in which the body is perhaps most clearly addressed—in its anonymity—is Family Portraits, which the artist duo initiated the same year their first son was born.
Family Portraits is a collection of self-portraits taken during the artists’ travels to idyllic panoramic settings across the world. The series is a continuous long-term project and an investigation of how we perceive and preserve our memory of nature through mediated images, but also how we use the mediation of nature as self-identification. The four characters pose in front of grand vistas—a breathtaking fjord panorama at dusk; a snow-covered landscape with polar stratospheric clouds as the backdrop; a meadow at night; ramsons in full bloom.
It is a project that has taken on an almost ritual significance. Traveling to scenic locations; the persistent search for the right visual focus; spending time there to understand the location’s conditions; the meticulous observation of the exact moments when dawn and dusk occur, for it is during these brief moments of time that most of the photography is carried out. During the shoot, all four individuals put on reflective suits, collectively move to the right vantage point, and position themselves in front of the camera. Stand still. Repeat the procedure if the photograph did not turn out as they envisioned.
Initially, Inka & Niclas thought of the ongoing project as a way to experience nature through the camera lens. Today, Family Portraits seems more existential. Again, there is the idea of the image as a shard of time. The initially three anonymous bodies have become four. With each new addition to the series, the children’s ever-growing silhouettes are depicted—a subtle reminder of the fleeting nature of time. The function of the suits erases facial features. Where the bodies should have occupied the photograph, there is now a void—reflective surfaces for the viewer to fill. One of the driving forces behind the project is undoubtedly the universal idea of establishing a chronology in pictures—the classic family album, which solidifies our connection to our loved ones.
As of this writing, the series has been ongoing for nearly a decade, and the conversation around the photographs seems to shift in tune with its time. Today’s prevailing collapse of a universal effort for the environment casts the remarkable nacreous cloud in Family Portrait XIV (2020) in a new light. Nacreous clouds, or polar stratospheric clouds, form in the stratosphere in polar regions and play an active role in the formation of ozone holes over Antarctica. A natural wonder that testifies to its decay.

Finding the Universe in the Roadside Clutter

Luminous Matter

From depicting grand nature views to the careful composition of a buttercup by the roadside. The contemporary perceived affinity for nature is not a result of our closeness to it, but rather an echo of our estrangement from it. When we no longer live directly in or near nature, forests, and fields as we once did, it becomes a projection surface for our nostalgia and fantasies. Thus, our collective enthusiasm for nature can be assumed to be an urban phenomenon. In Luminous Matter, the artists have narrowed down their perspective, both in terms of subject matter and geography. Inka & Niclas continue their examination of nature as a cultural construct, but the focus now lies on milieus connected to the artists’ own childhood and heritage. Luminous Matter centers around depictions of wildflowers and weeds found closer to the artists’ native and local surroundings. The exploration through the camera has led the duo’s interest in several wildflower species found along the roadside in Sweden—flowers so common in the Swedish scenery that they almost go unnoticed in our collective consciousness.
Biologists and scholars James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler have introduced the term plant blindness. They define the term as the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s environment and as the misguided anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, and thus as unworthy of consideration. Those persons afflicted with this condition exhibit symptoms such as thinking of plants as merely the backdrop of animal life and failing to see, notice, or focus attention on plants in one’s daily life.
In the series Luminous Matter, Inka & Niclas challenge this syndrome by literally spotlighting the plant species buttercup, cow parsley, and woodland geranium. The camera lens partly functions as a binocular or a magnifying glass—transforming the flora by the roadside from an unseen backdrop to an illuminated nocturnal scene. A microcosm strikingly similar to the infinite space of luminous matter found in images from NASA’s digital photo archives.
All the plants are considered weeds, contrasting with the magical glow that surrounds and accentuates their fragile features. Like the focal point of magical realism, there is a depiction of reality, enhanced by supernatural elements. The work transcends the borders of the local context and its site specificity, offering a view into an alternate cosmos in the otherwise overlooked roadside clutter.

The Dissolution of Photography Between Layers of Keratin, Emulsion Fluids, and Pigment

Extensions

Throughout their work, Inka & Niclas have consistently explored the impact of popular culture on the relationship between humans and nature. A popular cultural activity that they themselves are part of and often depict (which, incidentally, has developed in close relation to photography) is tourism’s influence on nature representations. In the series Extensions, the artist duo portrays paradise-like environments on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, which mostly consist of rainforest and white sandy beaches. Located off the coast of West Africa, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe is Africa’s second smallest state by area. The environments may seem familiar, but the fact is that most of us have never seen them except in photographs. For the project Extensions, the artist duo identified the most common vistas of the two islands on the Internet and sought out the same places. The scenes are enhanced by a light glimmer—an effect of the camera flash being unconventionally directed back at the camera lens. As if the hyper-romantic environment didn’t already have enough of beauty, the scene is elevated by the suggestive shimmer, hinting at the consumption of nature depictions and the circulation of its images as a commodity.

Sun-drenched morning in the car on the island of Príncipe. A hint of movement in an otherwise slumbering, calm village. Gently washed hair extensions dancing in the wind, hung out to dry on a clothesline. The morning light filtering through the strands of hair.

A fleeting memory etched on the retina that led to experimenting with new materials. Unusually, there is only a memory from this occasion—at that moment, it felt too intrusive and revealing to document someone else’s hair extensions. There is a tacit agreement that an extension should not be displayed until it adorns a head. Hair is charged. Intimate. Something that has grown on a body. Like images on an influencer’s Instagram account, hair also builds identity. Healthy and thick, perfectly straightened, it is an expression of the drive to control one’s resources. A capital of youth.
Inka & Niclas approach hair as a given material for experimentation with both movement and transparency, but there is also a fascination with the layers of connotations that hair extensions evoke in many popular cultural contexts. Braids and weaving. The rather iconic wig master Tomihiro Kono’s playful creations. The material’s desirable properties are also its biggest problem—working with unpredictability and movement makes the process a constant experimentation. Since photo printing on human hair is a relatively untested technique, there are no previous templates to rely on. Earlier test prints that did not turn out as the artists had hoped must be removed. The hair is carefully washed out, hung to dry, and gently prepared again. In the experimental work process, the artist duo paradoxically returns to the traditional photographic techniques that have been a gateway to their work with the photographic medium.
It is in the nature of photography that its subject is fixed—a fragment of an event. By using such an unruly material as human hair, the artists dissolve the static surface of photography. It simply cannot be controlled or directed too much. The result is an artwork that moves with the slightest breeze and body movements. Freed from the static, the objects are no longer photographs, nor are they sculptures. They stand outside these categorizations. With impressions from rainforests and sandy beaches, they become subdued and dreamlike totems. Between the layers of keratin, emulsion fluids, and pigment rests the anonymous presence of the individual who once bore the hair, but also of the artists, whose own appearance strikingly resembles the processed locks.

Digital Scrap and Circular Usage

Sunset Photography

What do you do with an album that has preserved everything indiscriminately, the entire overwhelming past? Photography gravitates toward an extreme where the whole life is to be fixed, where the entire span of life is to be measured in its real length; one writes tirelessly, but no one reads what is written.
Maria Stepanova
In the book In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova writes about the challenge that follows the possibility of mass storage in digital photography. In the vast amount of material on hard drives, unlike the increasingly rare physical family album, there is rarely any active selection. Once again, the sheer volume of photography obstructs active seeing. This phenomenon has been a starting point for Inka & Niclas in the sculptural series Sunset Photography. The project arose from the desire to revisit the digital scrap found on the artists’ numerous hard drives. Over the years, the duo has pragmatically established an extensive image bank—it is simply very cumbersome to clean out a hard drive. Most of the saved digital photographs have never been looked at because Inka & Niclas often know at the moment the right picture is taken, that it is the one. In their work with Sunset Photography, they revisited the archives, hoping to find raw material with other qualities than those they usually look for. It is not a matter of direct reuse, as most of the images on the hard drives have not been used before, but the work process still becomes retrospective.
Saturated sunsets and landscape motifs are printed on textiles and covered with layers of resin. Weighed down by the plastics, they yield to gravity—as if the photograph has given way and fallen to the ground like a used wet towel. A reminder of the use and consumption of nature views. The motif becomes distorted, but the gaze can still somewhat discern what is glimpsed between layers of wet folds.
Philosopher Jonna Bornemark describes the artist’s work as a process that involves sensitivity to the sensory aspects of a situation: how something looks, feels, sounds, and smells. It is within this sensory experience that the artistic process takes place. In a time where we easily drift into abstractions and generalizations, and where words often take over entirely, we must train ourselves to stay rooted in the sensory impressions of the here and now. In viewing Inka & Niclas’ work, it is striking how many ways they engage with the mechanics of vision: composing monumental nature views; zooming in on seemingly overlooked fragments of local flora; dissolving the motif in the meeting between photography and unusual materials; playing with the hidden in the sculptural works.
All are ways to seek to awaken the dormant, habitual seeing again. Do you have access to your perception? Can you see the cosmos in the clutter by the roadside?