| I mostly photograph women. I don’t know why but this is the only subject that I consistently feel compelled to document. I always think of my images as a fragment of a larger narrative, and this narrative is a spontaneous reaction to the model (her character, her clothes, and how she projects herself). So in a sense the work is really about her, although I probably don’t know her, and have never met her before the shoot. In 2007 I won the Erotic Photographer of the Year in the U.K., which was a big surprise to me. This led me to explore the more overtly erotic side of my work for a while, but recently I have become more interested in manipulating the images I make, either in camera or digitally in processing. I am very inspired by psychedelic art…. |  |
Christian J Petersen
I mostly photograph women. I don’t know why but this is the only subject that I consistently feel compelled to document. I always think of my images as a fragment of a larger narrative, and this narrative is a spontaneous reaction to the model (her character, her clothes, and how she projects herself). So in a sense the work is really about her, although I probably don’t know her, and have never met her before the shoot. In 2007 I won the Erotic Photographer of the Year in the U.K., which was a big surprise to me. This led me to explore the more overtly erotic side of my work for a while, but recently I have become more interested in manipulating the images I make, either in camera or digitally in processing. I am very inspired by psychedelic art, and I think that I try to capture or generate a mystical or spiritual event in my work. In some ways my work could be seen as a refusal to accept reality, and as an attempt to recreate it as what I would prefer it to be. But each image always begins and ends in something very real: I like to leave mundane details that some people consider ugly, a cable or plug for instance, or a window frame that ruins the symmetry of the picture. I don’t want to create an unreal situation and then photograph it. I want to discover a moment of fantasy in an ordinary event.
I recently founded a free magazine called I Want You (www.iwantyoumagazine.com), which I art-direct and curate. I decided to start the magazine, which features only images and no text, because I felt that a lot of the work that I can relate to does not seem to have a natural home within the established art world. I am not sure how I would define my work, or how others would categorize it. Is it fashion, fine art, erotic, psychedelic, or something else? I Want You is a forum for work that is equally hard to define. A lot of the artists featured in it are unknown, forgotten or ignored but, in my opinion, deserve a wider audience.
