Gewächs – with Nosizwe Baqwa

Born from a weekend at the Lyngør firehouse on Norway’s southern coast—one of those places so starkly beautiful it almost risks becoming a cliché, until you’re actually there.

I had brought my analog Hasselblad, as I always do, to pin a moment to film. We were only a few months into our relationship, walking the island in that early, unreasonable kind of happiness. At some point Nosizwe—my partner and an artist in her own right—built a small, improvised sculpture from branches and a tree stump. Then she took the camera and made an exposure without really knowing the setup.

When the film came back, the image was “wrong” in nearly every technical sense—and somehow exactly right. Not a mistake, more like a portrait of how we move through the world: intuitive, a little chaotic, and intensely present.

Later, I chose to let the photograph carry its own “afterlife.” Before scanning, I dragged the negative gently along the floor so it could pick up dust—tiny, real particles that become visible only when light passes through the film again.

In the final image, that dust reads like a second exposure: not of the island, but of time, handling, and chance. It’s a quiet reminder that this isn’t just an image of a moment—it’s a physical thing that has been touched, marked, and made.

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