About Janne

My photographic work since 1995 has been borne by a desire to engage in more comprehensive, in-depth projects. Throughout this period my deep involvement has been a strong guiding principle, leading from one project to the next.

The first big project on my own was a trip to Albania in 1995. The trip resulted in an exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. This show made it possible for me to spend time at San Cataldo, a retreat for artists and researchers, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

A working month spent at San Cataldo resulted in yet another show and the book Golfo di Salerno, which in turn made possible a long stay in Japan. My three months in Kyoto, and travel in the surrounding countryside, produced a wealth of pictures. These became the book Eternally the River Flows – But the Water Is Never the Same. The inspiration afforded by my trip to Japan led to experimental work with the photogravure technique, and a number of shows in Denmark and abroad. Following the Japanese project I was commissioned to plan and photograph a book for Toyota Denmark, and then to plan and photograph a book for the building Klitgården in Skagen, Denmark.

The publishing of the book about Klitgården later led to my collaboration with the author Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, and to a long sequence of collaborative projects with authors, on themes of both artistic and scientific nature.
For a photographer to be able to fulfill an assignment in a partnership with an author, it is vital for her to be thoroughly familiar with the story, as though it were her own. Without empathy and without the wish to learn from the process, it is not possible for her to remain true to her own pictorial expression. These on-going collaborations with authors have in every way been most informative and rewarding work processes.

In 2008 I was invited to participate in the project “Denmark in Transition,” in which fourteen photographers, over a two-year period of work, were to give their own, completely personal, picture of Denmark.

“Denmark in Transition” was a project that gave me financial security and free hands to work with a self-chosen theme. It was a new kind of project. My chosen theme became “Denmark’s coasts,” and the project was the reason that, in 2011, I began a long quest along the coastlines of the country. My wish was to bring into being a purely photographic narrative. The story is now complete, with the exhibition and publishing of the book The Coasts of Denmark – a Photographic Narrative, by Janne Klerk.