Helena Kvarnström was born in Sweden, raised in America and currently resides in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been exhibited internationally and in 2005, her novella and photography book, Violence, was published by Lazyline. She is interested in stillness, hidden threats, and ghosts within natural environments.

FJORD: Many of the titles of your photographs refer to the places where the images were taken. Are the places significant to the content of your imagery?

Helena: Place has always been very significant for me and a way of cataloguing experiences and memories.  I emigrated from Sweden to the US as a child, moved around the US, then to Canada, England and Canada again.  Every memory I have is first identified by location, like “when we lived in London” or “when we lived in the brown house in Chicago,” so that is why I name the places where the photographs are taken.

F: What is your connection to the natural environments in which you photograph?

H: I photograph primarily public park spaces in Southern Ontario, which are places I like to go hiking with my dog and they are some of my favourite places in the world.  There is nothing better than being in a forest or a lake.  I think maybe I am especially drawn to photographing them because I grew up with all this Swedish folklore in which forests and lakes are these kind of magical places, but also dangerous and unknown.   When I go to other places I seek out other natural environments, partially to photograph and partially just because I love being in them.

F: I noticed that there is a lack of human presence in many of your images in nature.  Does human presence transform how you view the space?

H: Most of the time when humans are in photographs they become the most important thing in the picture and often that isn’t what I want to be talking about.  Humans can disrupt the way I see natural spaces as so fantastic and mysterious and powerful by making them seem smaller, more ordinary.  However, I have started to introduce human figures into the natural spaces and create relationships between the human and the natural environment, but I think it’s difficult to maintain a focus on the tree or the water or whatever when there’s a person in the photograph because we’re so obsessed with other humans and what they’re doing that we stop paying attention to other things.

F: How do you feel the Internet has affected the way you work? Have you changed the style of work you do or the way you present your work based on the way the Internet has changed how photography functions?

H: I started building websites and posting photographs online in 1997, when I was seventeen years old.  It’s always been a part of how I work and I don’t know exactly how my style might be different without it.  In some ways, when I was younger, it probably made me much more self-conscious and insecure because all these strangers were watching me grow up, personally and artistically, online, and that makes you so vulnerable.  For a long time my photography was so autobiographical, it was my diary, and it wasn’t healthy for me to keep showing it to anyone who happened across my website.  I had to really re-think what I wanted photography and the internet to be for me and move toward less explicitly confessional work.  At the same time, I have received so much encouragement and made so many connections on the internet, both in terms of professional development and in showing me what photography can do for people emotionally.  Because the internet and my website have always been primarily social and personal rather than professional spaces, I don’t edit my online portfolio as tightly many photographers do.  I have photographs up that I would never put in a show, that I know aren’t the strongest images, but that have meaning or contain memories for me.

F: How do you gain inspiration for your work? Where do you look for ideas?

H: Nature, personal experiences, phobias, stories I read, songs.  Other artists also inspire me greatly.

F: What are your favorite websites?

H:

http://butdoesitfloat.com
http://sentamemory.com/ - Kim Winderman
http://yuulabenivolski.com/ - Yuula Benivolski, who is an incredible artist and a model in many of my photographs.

F: Where do you see your work going in the next year and in the future in general?

H: I am hoping to do more work with models,  do a series of photographs about water and I have some trips planned to photograph new environments.  My partner and I also recently made a digital video project and I want to experiment more with video work.

Visit Helena’s website here