I often have to feel my way through the alternatives. The 99-cent store is attractive because it offers objects that aren't promoted in glossy magazines. The work then becomes a form of alchemy.

Initially I borrowed the word "perverse" for my works from Roland Barthes, meaning pleasure-driven and not geared to inform or promote a service or a product.

Making photographs can be a way for me to bring something up and into consciousness, something either shared or individual.

I've found that photographs from different genres can be extraordinarily generous with each other. I started out photographing myself in a landscape, moved on to landscapes with and without other people, and then onto buildings, still lives, portraits, and body parts in rooms. If certain aspects of my production are getting more attention right now I think it is directly linked to a general absence of dreamed bodies in contemporary art. Viewers who mainly follow fashion have most likely not noticed this lack.

I often have to feel my way through the alternatives. The 99-cent store is attractive because it offers objects that aren't promoted in glossy magazines. The work then becomes a form of alchemy.

I'd like the photographs to potentially be meaningful to a wide range of people. They do not grow out of the reportage mode, this was always clear to me. Personal imaginations blend into each other and create our visual cultures. No one is a neutral observer of this field.

I am fascinated by how images and motifs move between and adjust to different cultures. I'm a Norwegian living in Los Angeles showing a photograph inspired by Japanese image culture in an American beach town named after a sinking city in Italy.