Preface by Jeanette Land Schou

The Common has been my back garden since childhood. At first as a landfill with daily migrations of seagulls above our detached house. Since, as a rugged prairie for our play as Cowboys and Indians. Slowly nature healed across car-wrecks and blue soil, and by the 90’s the Common had become alive and green. It became a free space and a playground for my photography; my landscape. It has become a picture of our everchanging relationship with nature.

Since March 2020 I’ve taken short trips to a very small corner of the Common. Strictly speaking, the area is not wild. It is characterized by the big city, and subject to a careful maintenance. But it appears as such; wild. Like others I need this ’wild’ experience; to get a little bit lost in a nature that closes in around me and allows me to think and breathe freely. With the framing of the camera, I can create images that excludes the disturbing attacks on the marginal areas of the Common and maintain that illusion, or more exactly reveals it, by allowing the houses in the city to become visible, imposing and blue as a part of the sky.

My photographs are neither documentation nor botany, it is completely irrelevant what the Latin names of trees and shrubs are, just as animals and people are only present through the trampled paths and other traces left behind.

All photographs are taken in natural daylight, and I hope with this neutrality to make room for the viewer's own empathy, so that they can take in this jumble of colors, lines and resolutions quite unfiltered. The camera is digital, but there is no manipulation in Photoshop, and we are far away from the conventional beautifications.

Throughout my photographic practice, I have related to the landscape and to the photographer's mediation of it. A significant feature of my photography is a desire for a "democratization" of the image - both as the photographer W. Eggleston uses the term in "the Democratic Forest", and as I interpret it. In a "democratic" photographic vision, all elements have equal value, and a boring car park can be just as "photogenic" as the most beautiful patch of forest.

In this book "Off Road" I try with simple techniques to make tangled branches, leaves, trunks and foliage fall into place in chaotic, non-hierarchical, yet harmonious compositions.

The photographs are thus an invitation to let your gaze wander.