Week 61: Lina Scheynius

The rotating gallery features the work of an emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the Internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Alek Lindus interviews Lina Scheynius.

Alek Lindus: Would you describe the context of your visit to Sarajevo and did you have the book in mind before you went?

Lina Scheynius: I was approached by Antoine at be-poles in August last year. He was wondering if I was interested in making a book about a city - any city in fact. Sarajevo was my first choice. I had such a strong image of this city in my head from growing up with the war in yugoslavia on television and I was sure the image I had been fed and still had was completely incorrect for Sarajevo today (it was probably slightly incorrect for the Sarajevo of yesterday as well, but that is a different subject). So i was curious to go there and see what i would find myself and saw this as the perfect opportunity.

AL: How did these 2 [the fed and the actual] impressions correlate during your visit?

LS: Go on google image and type the words sarajevo and war in the search field first of all. Then imagine you have never heard about this place before. And that you are 12 years old and living in one of the safest countries in the world, and that these images appear on television and in papers frequently. And then you find out that the war is over, but you do not hear or see much else about the city for the next 15 years.

I was obviously more than aware of Sarajevo now being something completely different. But it was hard to not associate the word Sarajevo with those first dark impressions and to know what this different thing was.
The first thing that struck me when arriving in the city was how incredibly peaceful and beautiful it was.

It’s not hard to find traces of the war, but the impressions (as I expected) didn’t correlate well at all to be honest.

AL: The war and the evidence of it is a significant part of your images and their relation to one another; you use 2 images of images, I’m referring to the one of the large battalion of soldiers in WWI uniforms and another of what seems to be German WW2 soldiers and an explosion, the map also could be military divisions would you describe/explain these?

LS: I spent the two weeks in Sarajevo walking around with my camera exploring and photographing things the guidebook told me about and things that people told me about and things that i just happened to stumble upon. I did find quite a lot of traces of previous wars. These images were found in two different museums, and as I found them striking I photographed them. They remind me of ghosts or scars, and I thought it was important to include them in the book.

AL: Your work has been described as personal, of which there are elements here in this series, but there is also very much a documentary slant in some of the images [the escape tunnel  under the airport, the gun display, muslim graveyards, building pock marked with bullet holes and 'sniper alley'] when you edited your selection [I'm assuming here that you did and not the publisher] how did this work for you? Did you find the contrast more difficult?

LS: I would describe all my work as personal with a documentary approach, and I didn’t want this book to differ too much to what i normally do. It’s a very different subject, but I wanted to approach it with the same method as I would any subject. It’s true that the editing process was slightly difficult at first. I had to ask the question weather certain very personal pictures that could have been taken almost anywhere were important for this book or not. But since i had a completely free hands from the publisher and since I wanted this to be a record of my experience in sarajevo, and my impression of the city, and not anything else - I kept them in. After i made that decision it got easier. My editing process is very instinctual.


AL: In your series of images of specific and personal are those which are ‘anonymous’ [the stone box in the ground, shrubs with water, wolf...] how do you see the role these play in your combining of images?

LS: For me they are there because they add a feeling or a break or a question.

AL: Would you like to do more work [commissioned] like this? A different subject, with your impression of it?

LS: I would absolutely love to! It’s amazing to be given free hands by someone who trusts you, and to be able to work with a subject you might not have done normally. The deadline is actually a good thing too in my case, it gives me an extra kick in the butt.

AL: Please tell me what that illuminated thing in the 4th image is.

LS: We (my boyfriend and I) were in Sarajevo in November so the weather wasn’t amazing at all times. It rained quite a bit and we spent some of those rainy days in our hotel room. Resting or working or watching telly. There wasn’t much in english on tv, so we started watching animal channel. This is a photo I took of the tv screen. It’s from an underwater sequence about life in the ocean. It sort of reminds me of Sarajevo at night with all the lights from the houses on the hills looking like stars surrounding the city.