Trine Sörgaard Parmo Krog: Why did you chose to become a photographer?

Christoffer Joergensen: The period in which I wanted to be a writer ended in isolation. The camera became the companion that got me involved with the world again, at the same time as forming a kind of shield to protect me from it.

TSPK: Where do you get inspiration?

CJ: The process of working on my two long-term projects Plectage and Public Spheres continues to inspire me.

Also, discussing my work with smart people whose opinion I value is really important to me.

TSPK: How have you developed as a photographer?

CJ: In slow, more or less considered steps. I have a lot of ideas every week, most of which are eventually dismissed in favour of my two core projects. I’ve been working on those since roughly 2008. That was also the year when I made a pact with myself to use photography as the foundation of all my artistic endeavours. I continue to experiment within the framework of photography, combining the medium with other digital or analogue techniques and processes.

TSPK: What photograph that you didn’t take yourself particularly fascinates you?

CJ: Andreas Gursky’s New York Stock Exchange is a masterpiece if such a thing still exists.

TSPK: Are you showing a series or are you showing different projects in your exhibition?

CJ: There are several series in the show but the focus is on my Public Spheres project, for which I am currently photographing the plenary halls of all the EU member state parliaments.

TSPK: In some of your images you are investigating the notion of a democratic image. How did such an interest arise, why is it relevant and how are you actually implementing this idea?

CJ: I’m still wondering what an image with a democratic aesthetic might look like. When the german philosopher Peter Sloterdijk said that Giotto was the first painter to make democratic images, I believe he was referring to Giotto’s crowds. After a long monopoly of icon painting, Giotto can be said to have introduced a new sense of multiplicity. There are actually all kinds of crowds in his paintings: perfectly organised crowds, chaotic crowds, crowds of flying angels, angry crowds, worshipping crowds etc.

On the other hand, Slavoj Žižek wrote somewhere that the only proper way to depict the people as an entity is through a single, representative body – the body of Christ or the body of Marat, for instance. Actually, when you combine Sloterdijk’s view with that of Žižek, you get something like Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Even though my two projects look visually quite different from each other, both of them in my view incorporate the aesthetic of democracy in that they create a field of tension between the singular and the multiple. Bruno Latour put it like this: “The demos is haunted by the demon of devision.” In other words, democracy divides the people at the same time as uniting them.

TSPK: Is photography a democratic medium or a mass medium?

CJ: Photography has certainly become a very accessible medium, not least through its digitisation. To me photography currently caters to the weird and paradoxical notion of mass-individualism. We all seem to do the same thing to prove that we are special. Think of the millions and millions of “selfies” that have been taken and uploaded in the last years. But are they an expression of democratic culture? I struggle to see how…perhaps when perceived collectively but the spirit of citizenship is utterly missing in them.

TSPK: Is an image that captures the notion of democracy necessarily a democratic image?

CJ: There is a difference between an image that depicts a democratic event and an image that feels democratic in itself. Perhaps a democracy is actually to a great degree sustained by undemocratic imagery.

We are all used to seeing photographic portraits of our politicians on huge billboards. These may be images of democratic representatives but are they democratic images?

One should also distinguish between democracy as a concrete political instrument and democracy as ideology. the term democratic can be very foggy, sometimes simply denoting something that is accessible to many people, like a camera, which now everyone has in his or her smartphone.

TSPK: You are showing works of places of democracy in form of European parliament halls and of parliamentarians. The expression in the series varies quite a lot. Can you explain how and can you tell us something about what makes these images democratic?

CJ: The Public Spheres project contains two different series, the straight photographs of plenary halls and the actual Public Spheres. The plenary hall photos aspire to be objective, classical, archival. The Public Spheres, on the other hand, transform this dry content into something almost excessive. They are celebratory, they celebrate democracy, whereas the straight plenary hall documents characterise the spirit of sober reflection and research, which is essential to the proper functioning of democracy.

TSPK: Another exhibition in the festival is also operating with the idea of a democratic photograph and borrows the term from William Eggleston who used it to link his works together, partly in order to mark a specific attitude towards subject matter and photography. He would for example say, I have photographed democratically, meaning that he treated the subject matter of his photographs democratically. Nothing was more important or worth more than anything else. What do you think about such a definition?

CJ: William Eggleston had a great eye for details that tell us about the day-to-day world of America. His photographs never feel banal or random. If he designed his oeuvre in such a way that no image had more or less weight than the others, he must have chosen his subject matter very carefully. And if he only photographed things with equal weight, then he certainly excluded a lot of subject matter that was lighter or heavier. (He didn’t do panoramic Gursky-style birds-eye-views, for instance.) It’s a fascinating thought to me that, in order to maintain a democratic oeuvre, William Eggleston had to be exclusive.