Fjords and Fragments
Fjords and Fragments is a visual exploration of the Arctic town of Bodø — a city caught between sea, sky and mountains. The title reflects its fragmented history and shifting identity, shaped by both nature and human intervention. In this place where urban structure meets untamed landscape, I explore how past and transformation leave their traces.
Bodø's location just north of the Arctic Circle makes it a city of remarkable contrasts, where the midnight sun meets winter darkness, and where nature and urban life overlap at every turn. The sea and wind shape its rhythm. Once a trading post and a Sámi settlement area, it was later bombed and rebuilt after World War II. Now, it is the first city north of the Arctic Circle to become a European Capital of Culture. Its story is one of resilience and reinvention — constantly rebuilding, continually redefining itself against the landscape that surrounds it.
Through black-and-white photography, I seek out Bodø's raw textures and contrasts, revealing the interplay of light and shadow. The project combines digital and analogue techniques — I shoot digitally, then expose Polaroids in a digital lab. After development, I cut the Polaroids from their frames, dilute the image-bearing emulsion, and stretch it onto watercolour paper. This physical manipulation mirrors the city's ongoing transformation, where history and renewal coexist. It is also a personal gesture: an act of both preservation and letting go.
During exposure, I introduce simple geometric forms — squares, triangles, circles, and lines — that recall the city's building blocks. These shapes suggest structure amid fragmentation and invite reflection on how the pieces of a place connect and drift apart.
Today, with the development of the new airport and the urbanisation of the old airport, reshaping its horizon, Bodø stands once again at a threshold. I photograph it as it is now: vulnerable, changing, captivating. The act of working with Polaroids — cutting, lifting, stretching, and transferring the fragile emulsion — becomes a metaphor for the city itself. Each image is rebuilt, altered, and imperfect, just as Bodø is, where destruction and renewal are part of the same ongoing cycle. Over time, these Polaroid prints will also fade and decay, echoing the inevitable transformation of the city we know today into something new.
At its core, Fjords and Fragments is both a personal and universal meditation on impermanence — on how places, like people, are continuously remade by time, weather, and life's circumstances. The project reflects Bodø's story, but it is also my love note to the town — a way to hold onto it for a moment, even as it continues to change. It speaks to the timeless human rhythm of destruction and renewal that defines every landscape we call home.
