Interview with Søren Solkær
Known for capturing the innermost essence of artists through his portraits, Søren Solkær is behind many of the iconic portraitures of musicians, actors and directors. Among these are images of Björk, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, David Lynch, Arctic Monkeys, and U2.
Recently, Solkær released an entirely different project as he turned to the streets in search of the faces behind the most iconic street art pieces in various cities around the world. SURFACE, a 240-page hardcover photographic title is the result of three years of Solkær’s work. It portrays the worlds of some of the most renowned street artists in a creative way, safeguarding many of their identities.
Solkær, who was visiting Melbourne after his recent trip to Sydney, Australia, visited the fluoro space and shared his experiences in the city and told us where his journey next would take him. He was staying in an inspiring space – a converted Buddhist Temple – owned by a couple who had a street art collection that made Solkær widen his eyes. Their space was bursting with street art, fuelling Solkær’s adoration for the form.
With the striking title in hand, we were ready to delve deeper into Solkær’s world. As he made himself comfortable in our space, we started the conversation. Danish documentary filmmaker Tine Reingaard has been documenting a major part of the making of SURFACE and has joined Solkær on many of his projects. She is currently producing a full-length documentary on the project and also joined us for the chat.
fluoro. How did you get into photography?
Søren Solkær. It started a bit late actually. I didn’t start studying photography until I was 24, but I did a lot of photography from the age of 19, mainly while I was travelling. After high school I left Denmark for quite a while. My first trip was to Australia and Asia. It started as travel-photography but I was really fascinated with what a camera could do. It just enabled you to do a lot of things, to meet a lot of people. In Asia you could go almost anywhere if you had a professional camera. So it was just a way of exploring the world and meeting people.
f. Did you expect photography to open that window for you?
SS. No actually I didn’t. There’s not really anyone working in a creative field in my family, so for a few years I didn’t really see that as a career option. So I went to study something else in university, I studied literature first, but photography kind of stuck with me, and I thought about it a lot during those years. I took another year break and went travelling again and did even more photography, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to change. I love photography and I love travelling and now that’s all I do, so it’s pretty amazing.
f.Does your Danish heritage and upbringing affect your work and your outlook on photography?
SS. I don’t really think so. Denmark doesn’t really have a strong tradition for photography. I studied in Prague in the Czech Republic for two years and they have a very strong, like a national style of photography that’s very closely linked to theatre. It’s kind of dark and very staged photography. So I was very influenced from that, much more so than Denmark. But having said that, there are still many images that people would say are very Nordic, so I think growing up there and having a Northern sensibility does come across somehow.
f.Cinema and painting are known to be some of your influences. What else influences you and your work?
SS. They’re definitely the main influences. I follow art photography but I don’t really follow magazine photography very much. I’ve done quite a bit of commercial work myself and I just get less and less interested in short–lived photography that’s just for a campaign or this month’s flavour. That’s what I really like about doing portraiture. If you can do an iconic image of someone it has a very long lifespan and it can almost become the icon for that person.
f.We have spoken to a number of the street artists that you have in SURFACE, from Anthony Lister, Vexta, right through to Alexandre Farto (aka Vhils) and they are all very unique in their own way. How did you work around such different personalities and styles to make it work with your own?
SS. I suppose that’s my job, for my visual language to become sort of the unifying factor for everything. It’s not like a conscious decision I suppose, it’s also a matter of taste and craft and just a matter of the way you direct things. And, because I’ve been doing this for about 20 years, I think it has a certain consistency now that wasn’t there maybe 15 years ago where it was a little more about trying things out. For this project I’ve taken a lot of inspiration in many cases from the art work itself and then I tried to create an idea using that as a starting point and I think then its more, probably, the mood and the lighting that’s kind of my fingerprint on it because there’s also lot of the artist in it.
f.In terms of lighting and material, what do you use to be able to put this together? Is it always that case that you fill your backpack and work with what you have in there?
SS. I had to really change my whole setup for this project because when I did the first few, I came to the shoot with my usual gear and it was so heavy and really big, like studio lighting. I suppose, a more commercial setup, but then I found a lighter version. They’re still pretty heavy, but now I can actually carry everything myself, because we found that a lot of this work is not really easy to get to. Sometimes you have to walk through industrial grounds or you have to climb fences, so I had to find a setup that worked for this project, just like these artists have found various ways to be able to create huge artworks with what they can carry in a back pack.
f.Beside the logistic challenges were there any other challenges that you had with shooting?
SS. A lot of the challenges were, and are still, getting to people. I found that some of the most important artists have come through other artists, so that’s always the way to do it. I have a very big network now in this world so now I can use that to get to the last few. I’m still working on this, I mean now this book just came out but I only printed 3,000 copies because I wanted to do a second edition with new images in it.
f. You mentioned there are a few that you wanted to get to, who are they?
SS. There is Banksy, there is Futura, Retna, J.R., Pixel Pancho, but a lot of those people travel as much as I do, so it’s been a question of luck sometimes to be in the same city and the person having time to do it or wanted to do it, but I’ve had very few people saying no.
I’ve been in talks with Banksy’s manager so we’ll see how we go.
f.Street artists are really secretive and illusive, has that changed you? Are you more secretive now three years later?
SS. Not really, but, I’m very aware of the sort of trust they’ve all shown me and I’m hoping that I’m not going to do anything that can cross their line. Also, the book only says the artist’s name. For those who really didn’t want to show their faces. That actually became a very interesting part of the project. It’s kind of a fun aspect.
f.Talk to me more about this [points to the Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman portrait in SURFACE] how did you find the props and the costume?
SS. Well, it was actually all in the room. He was painting this big long tunnel, and actually it’s just the lid from his paint bucket, so this was just a moment. It wasn’t so much a staged thing. He was extremely drunk and this just happened. Some of them are way more challenging. Like the BlekLeRat piece. He is really the essence of the very socially conscious street artist in Paris that has such a strong view and comments many issues, especially the poor. I really wanted to photograph him in Paris but he’s not really doing much in the streets anymore, so this [points to the BlekLeRat portrait in SURFACE] is in his house on the countryside. The challenge here was to show the essence of his work, but it was quite full of roses and just very beautiful where he lived. It was not very street. Luckily his studio was there, so I could go in and select pieces of work. A lot of them [the portraits] are quite constructed in a way. Also, many of them are taken from multiple images put together. Some of it is closer to fiction than to reality, its more sort of the idea about this person.
f.How do the street artists differ from the other subjects you’ve photographed, such as the musicians?
SS. With musicians you are photographing someone that everybody knows. Everyone has seen their likeness hundreds of times, so your image is one that is being compared to a lot of other images so you have to really stand out or do something very different, whereas these, for a lot of people is the first time they’ve see the artist behind the work. It’s a very different story and I think it’s great that the art can play such a big part in the portrait. Even a lot of the artists now who see the book they are like “Oh wow does he/she look like that?”
f.In a way you have brought these street artists to the surface. Could that be the meaning behind the title of your new book?
SS. I think it’s a little more abstract than that. It was much more about the artwork and the streets, just suddenly the city is becoming the studio and all the different textures and surfaces in them. Also, I really like that it had the word ‘face’ in it, and that’s also why I wrote it like that.
Tine Reingaard. Also, this project for you, as opposed to what you did before with musicians, where you tried to go very deep and do psychological portraits of the people, this is much more superficial, and its much more about artefacts and symbols and masks and you know “cool shit” in a way.
SS. Cool shit? [laughs]. Yeah, my last book was called closer and the portrait is a close-up and it’s very, sort of an intimate moment and that’s really what my portraits traditionally have been more like.
f. From a design perspective do you select your paper stocks and your sizes?
SS. Oh yeah! Definitely. Actually, my last two books were designed in Denmark but printed in China, but this time I printed in Denmark too, and I’m going to be doing that from now on. I would go to China to print the books but I just found that, first of all they work 24 hours [a day], so you have to stay up for 48 hours to do your book, but it’s six different people printing the book. I mean they’re trained printers obviously but they’ll never see the book, and they don’t really care. They want you to sign off the sheet so they can get on to the next one, whereas in Denmark I work with two printers and they’re very proud of doing the book and they’re going to have that book in their bookshelf as well. They have a lot of professional pride.
f. Just like you do.
SS. Yeah, because you spend three years and it’s been really hard to do this one. I mean some of those trips have been pretty crazy.
f. Why did you stop at three years?
SS. I haven’t really stopped, but now there was enough work to produce a book and exhibitions, but also that makes me travel even more, and then I can do more artists on the backend of those exhibitions.
SS. I think the few that I’m missing will actually be convinced by the book to be in the next one, so maybe that will be what it takes to get the last few. Actually the last two months I haven’t done any since I printed the book because it was a hard process. It’s been pretty stressful at times to do this, and it was just a big relief to do the book. Now, I’m starting to get hungry again…
f. Well you’re in Melbourne, good spot for it.
SS. Yeah, I photographed a lot of the artists from the Melbourne scene already, but there are still a couple that I want to do this week while I’m here.
f. Who will you shoot this week?
SS. Ghost Patrol I think. I was just on a trip with him up in Arnhem Land, someone’s producing a film up there and we, him, Gotye and myself, went up there for a week to some islands north of Australia. I was going to photograph him up there. He was going to do a painting in the sky with lasers but it didn’t really work, so I really want to photograph him now.
After Ghost Patrol, I’m going to redo a piece of Haha, the New Zealander, because I think that I can do a more interesting portrait of him. I just don’t think I captured the more mysterious side of him in my portrait. There are a few actually that I’ll probably end up reshooting just because I think that I can improve them and it’s also a way of keeping the idea of making a new book interesting to myself, like, how can I do this better?
f. What’s next for the future other than a second edition of SURFACE?
SS. I’m also working on a music book right now. It’s all pretty intimate back stage pictures from a big music festival near Copenhagen, Roskilde Festival. It’s one that I’ve been going to every year for many years. It’s a very big one and it has lot of really good names. I basically spend 2-3 hours with a number of bands, maybe 15 or 20 bands every year, about an hour before they go on stage so, the preparing, all the nervous energy, and all the rituals and then I get to be on stage with them as well, so I can hide somewhere, but it’s a very delicate line, depending on the band. I then also photograph them when they come off stage, full of sweat and all the relief. This festival has an audience of about 70,000-80,000 people so most bands get really uplifted from playing there because it’s just such a cool crowd.
f. When will that book be released?
SS. Maybe in three years. It’s a very slow process. It’s very hard to get to the really big bands, because that’s the last thing they want, a photographer in those moments, but last year I got Arctic Monkey’s and Jack White so I’m starting to get some of the big ones that I know from previous collaborations. So that’s one book I’m working on, and I’m also working on a different book as well.
I’ve been flying a lot the last many years and I always sit by the wing on the airplanes. I’ve been taking images out the window and from doing it for so many years they’ve become more and more abstract. I have this interesting very large series of airplane wings. I probably have enough work now for that book but I just haven’t had enough time to edit it. I think it will come out next year.
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From here the conversation took us all on series of tangents as Solkær vividly narrated his most recent adventures in Arnhem Land, told us more about his incredible hosts, his family in Denmark and explored our space further. Time flew as the chat went on and hours later Solkær and Reingaard left the fluoro space, ready to explore more of the art that graces Melbourne’s streets.
SURFACE is currently exhibiting in Melbourne, Australia at NKN Gallery until Friday 20 March 2015. Following the Australian tour, Solkær’s work will exhibit at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, Allouche Gallery in New York, Øksnehallen in Copenhagen as well as in Vancouver and London.
Follow Solkær’s work on Instagram @sorensolkaer and @surfaceproject as well as on Facebook @surfacebysorensolkaer and @sorensolkaer1.
We will keep you updated with this photographer’s journey as he takes us from one project through the other. Stay tuned to fluoro.
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