Collapsing Time in the Swedish Countryside
For the photographer Maja Daniels, history is an uneasy conglomerate of fiction and testimony.
Maja Daniels, Untitled, Älvdalen, 2021
Photography is notable both for its ability to objectively witness, and, paradoxically, for its access to the surreal. Something beyond our control can happen after the lens closes. It might be a light leak, movement recorded as blur, some shadow unaccounted for. History is similarly ambivalent, an uneasy conglomerate of fiction and testimony, which often employs photography in staking its claims. It is precisely in the overlap between these two murky territories that Maja Daniels, a Swedish photographer based in London and Gothenburg, begins her work.
To Daniels, the past is just as fictitious as the future. She leans into the all-too-human penchant for mythmaking and fantasy, our desire for saints and sorcerers and false closures. What becomes apparent is that history is a patchwork of stories and images, a condition that does not make it any less real. She looks for strangeness in what’s already there: “I take that something that must be in the water, and I run with it,” she told me recently.
One weird fish swimming upstream was Tenn Lars Persson, a mystic and photographer, whose early twentieth-century pictures of the Älvdalen region of Daniels’s grandparents have found a place among her own. They appear first, in her book, Elf Dalia (2019), clearly juxtaposed in dialogue, but also in her work as it has developed since. The photographs increasingly form a kind of synthesis; it becomes more and more difficult, and, perhaps, irrelevant, to say which belong to whom. Another example is Gertrud Svensdotter, a twelve-year-old girl, also in Älvdalen, who was thought to have walked on water in 1668, an event that ignited the Swedish witch hunts. Can we see in Daniels’s depictions of knobbly trees and people, shielding their eyes from the sun, some of the same magic and mystery that Persson portrayed a hundred years before? And in other little Älvdalen girls, a similar magnetic pull as Gertrud’s?
Courtesy Elfdalens Hembygdsförening (EHF)
Every one of Daniels’s photographs is something of a mystery. Subjects often turn their backs to her lens, or appear without the sort of context that might give us an idea of their purpose or location. An animal in a forest or in a child’s embrace; a collection of feathers held up against the light; a bonfire. About these individual images, we still have to ask what, who, where, why, but we can also expect the answers to refer, more or less, to the world as we know it. The greater mystery is in the space between them; how Daniels arranges her motifs to become part of a story.
Take the picture of a dragonfly on a tree stump, Persson’s one of three women and a child seen from a distance in a pine forest, and that of a green-haired, dog-eared figure, facing away. Look at those pictures all together, spaces included, and ask what the logic of the assemblage is. You’d be hard pressed to answer. Yet in trying to make sense of these fragments of narrative, the possibility of a whole other constructed world, another time opens up. We get the recipe for mythmaking, but without losing the allure of the myth itself.
Courtesy the artist
This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the title “On the Silence of Myth.”
