Simen Johan—an award-winning, internationally exhibiting artist, and a pioneer in digital image-making is publishing his third monograph. Representing 15 years of the artist’s career, and gathered here for the very first time in this deluxe volume, are his celebrated uncanny animal portraits, otherworldly landscapes, and psychologically-charged narrative natural scenes.\nWith a unique creative process that combines candid wildlife photography with digital manipulation, cinematic drama and a painterly approach, Simen Johan summons a metaphorically dense world into being where human fantasy and nature collide. In a catalogue essay, David E. Little, Executive Director of the International Center of Photography, writes: “Johan’s photographs underscore the importance of the creative act in photography, not as an act in itself, but as a means towards a conceptual and narrative goal.”\nTraveling both near and far to photograph his source material, Johan can find inspiration anywhere from the local zoo to the jungles of Costa Rica, or the lava fields of Iceland. He then spends countless hours assembling his images captured in these far-flung locations into a unifying whole. The result is an often-unsettling sense of placelessness.\nWe see in this collection images of pigeons flocking toward light like moths (or angels); stripes on a dazzle of Grévy’s zebras mesh with the fronds of geographically incongruent palms; two hapless caribou glazed with ice, frozen in a scene that is both tranquil and brutal.\nEach image reveals poetic and often unexpected relationships that speak to the illusory and multifaceted nature of existence. Tensions between what is revealed and what is concealed, what is alluring and what is menacing, what is fact and what is fiction, both shape and unsettle the scenes. Johan presents us with paradoxical photographic worlds that echo uncanny versions of our own.

Simen Johan

Arts & Photography

Johan, Simen

Photography & Video

powerHouse Books

From the publisher: "Simen Johan creates surreal and narrative tableaux of corrupted youth. His images of children and adolescents are constructed by digitally manipulating and combining parts of faces and bodies belonging to people of various ethnicities, ages, and genders. His fictional identities are depicted in equally fabricated scenarios that are replete with references to both the art historical tradition and Freudian sexuality. The poster-perfect finish of his prints belies the disturbing nature of their content; a pubescent girl hula hoops against an idyllic seaside backdrop, as the hoop leaves bruises on her waist; an androgynous teenager cradles the head of a dead sheep on which flies are beginning to land." From Simen Johan: "My photographs are composites of multiple-image fragments that I digitally manipulate and combine, including both images that I have photographed myself and found images. By combining different elements, my objective is to create artificial scenarios that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations. I want to evoke a sense of familiarity that will seduce the viewer into allowing his or her own experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular imagery to become tools for interpreting my work."

Room to Play

Individual Artists

Twin Palms Pub

My photographs are composites of multiple-image fragments that I digitally manipulate and combine, including both images that I have photographed myself and found images. By combining different elements, my objective is to create artificial scenarios that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations. I want to evoke a sense of familiarity that will seduce the viewer into allowing his or her own experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular imagery to become tools for interpreting my work. Simen Johan The power and pathos of Johan's images springs from his intuitions about the texture of childhood experience and from his method. He works in collage, the technique at the heart of Surrealism. Collage frees him to walk the world with his camera and receive its impossible permissions. Something ordinary will strike him -- a driveway, an abandoned house by the side of the road, a woman's cheek - and he will shoot it, or sample it digitally if it comes from another source, and file it in his electronic unconscious (the computer). Children, dolls, and the peculiar constructions at the heart of his photographs (Dolls stuffed with meat and bird corpses, among others) Johan usually photographs in his studio. How he assembles these elements into digital tableaus is the mystery, and the process of adding, subtracting and recombining can be lengthy. I don't finish quickly. he has remarked. Discards are strewn along his digital highway. Lyle Rexer

Rexer, Lyle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johan, Simen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Johan, Simen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johan, Simen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Simen Johan

Room to Play

Room to Play