A New Ethno-Aesthetics in Contemporary Photo-Based Art

Photo: Julie Edel Hardenberg: The Quiet Diversity, 2005.

A talk by  Mette Sandbye, Professor of Photography Studies and Head of department at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

With few exceptions the visual image of Greenland transmitted through photography has been highly stereotypical: ice and wild nature, peopled by tough sealers and hunters. Recently, however, new narratives have begun emerging among contemporary artists, many of whom use photography in radically new ways to construct an alternative “ethno-aesthetics”, to use Pia Arke’s term. This paper presents two such works, published almost simultaneously: Pia Arke’s Scoresbysundhistorier (2003)/Stories from Scoresbysund (2010) and Julie Edel Hardenberg’s Den stille mangfoldighed/The Quiet Diversity (2005).