Intermittence on Surfaces: On the Book 33 Suspensions by Dan Skjæveland

The book 33 Suspensions, published by Nearest Truth Editions, is a large-format photobook by Norwegian photographer Dan Skjæveland, released in 2023. This book contains 33 large-format color photographs, which collectively create a narrative centered around various abandoned objects, uninhabited spaces, and images viewed through a certain filter or interference, lending the shots a quality of premeditated imperfection.

This series of photographs explores the concept of flow that permeates all matter, focusing on the space where matter becomes expressive through its contractions: wrinkled fabric ceases to be mere clothing, the alignment of curtain rectangles transforms into a geometric language of intimacy, and glass interposed between the viewer and a landscape distorts the vision, revealing the state of the eyes that perceive these scenes in a deformed manner. The book captures environments and objects while also portraying a particular state of vision, where the eyes (and the photographic lens) reveal their imperfections, which are then embedded in the work as a whole. The images together stage and depict a way of seeing, where the sequence of images evokes movement from one image to the next, suggesting that Skjæveland aims to capture not just the images but the spaces between them—the movement within the interstices, the gaps between what is visible. This intermittent vibration is reflected in the friction of fabrics, the accumulation of hangers, the wrinkles in the plastic covering garments, the marks on asphalt, and the overarching metaphor of scabs on the skin symbolizing torn and mended objects.

Skjæveland's work centers on making protagonists out of objects in transit—functional objects that would never typically be the focal point of a scene. He highlights them in their worn-out luster, in the language of the human, now obsolete, to perhaps confront humanity. We, as humans, are the recipients of this language, which is, in turn, a human filter in its process of capturing and shuttering.

As for the title, it may refer to the power of the immobile object in its non-functional yet expressive quality—a space undefined, seeking its profile through the static force of an act that places its individuality within inaction, the inert revealing its vitality when isolated from its functional context that normally renders it unseen, and regarding place, the non-place of transit, the uninhabited space Marc Augé speaks of.

But what happens if we inhabit this rubble? Suspension. The reflective nature of vibrant material, as Jane Bennett might describe, concerning the power parallel to the human act of materials in diverse combinations, creating a latent and emerging language. This breeding ground is what 33 Suspensions glimpses, and what makes it a work that resonates across continents due to its thematic focus. The recording of materials—photography generally being an arrangement of our experience with matter—emphasizes these relationships in a way that, in their almost imperceptible corners, reveal spaces of contraction, what we abandon and what remains in its erosion as a result of human action.

33 Suspensions demands a viewer capable of reading the metaphorical nature of the images, someone who can perceive the subtleties between the lines and assign their own experiential context to this work, which delves into a realm far removed from the documentary and instead belongs to the realm of experience: each journey through its pages forms a present, timeless experience.

In my reading, I attribute values to the human nuances that compose this work. The remnants of a war may indeed represent just that, but they also evoke the daily war of so-called peaceful times, as suggested by the Chilean film Morir un poco (To Die a Little, 1966):

While wars begin and end in every corner of the earth, we in America face a worse, eternal, and silent war: the war of our indifference against the common man. It has created a different race of human beings with distinct appearance and physical texture, where it is not absurd to care more for the dead than the living, and where form and color, beauty and ugliness come together so that one may die a little each day. All this is called a time of peace (Introductory words from the movie Morir un poco).

Here, we build a bridge between Chile and Norway: this everyday war is reflected in 33 Suspensions, showing the remnants of humanity, which, like a tragedy, reveals itself in various construction materials—stairs, carpets, clothing, lamps, water pipes, cracks in concrete, moisture marks on wooden boxes, the plush covering the seats of a car...

Several references can aid in the exploration of this book. Firstly, the photographic work of Lewis Baltz, which deals with the material language of space, the intermediate spaces of construction, and the visual narratives of debris. Then there’s the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, with his concept of a visual diary, and particularly when he focuses on vestiges through objects, the close proximity to surfaces and the contracting frames that highlight the power of a still stimulus. Also noteworthy is the work of contemporary Chilean photographer Carlos Silva, who focuses on urban details, encountering torn materials where color and form express human occupation. However, a deeper dialogue can be found with the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose sculptural explorations of ruins resonate here. In Matta-Clark’s work, interventions occur in spaces on the brink of demolition, sculpting space and form. In Skjæveland’s book, it is the eye that seems to sculpt the forms, delivering them in a concatenated language. I interpret the biblical reference in the title as an allusion to the culmination and end of the life of things—how forms exult before becoming “dying forms,” as Arthur Rimbaud put it in his poem Twenty Years, emphasizing that after the exaltation of an era comes inevitable decay, applicable to this cycle of matter that exults, often unnoticed. Skjæveland delves deeply with an inner eye: these objects are ubiquitous, part of every place. They are the objects that avoid the gaze, the part under construction, the part in ruins, and also the function whose end is its purpose. The zone of non-place exults to highlight its fissure.

Skjæveland’s images are arranged with a balanced economy and eloquence—a sobriety that subtly fractures. The book accepts the risk of creating a microcosm of the intangible through material aspects, discarded objects positioned in sequence, manifesting the eloquence of their order according to their appearance. This aspect of the found, the mistreated vestige, or what appears spectrally, vibrating in its isolated materiality, gives Skjæveland’s work a crucial aspect of transposing existential and human dilemmas to every sphere and place in the world—problems that are, nevertheless, merely suggested. The book, structured like an interwoven text, meticulously ordered and threaded in its potency, opts for metaphor over the contextual specificity of the images, eschewing particular events in favor of found forms, marked as the suture of a sentiment sealed within its own contraction.

33 Suspensions could be considered the ultimate refinement of the visual diary, resolute in evading human representation, instead referencing it through the environment and its findings, and radical in its demonstration of how photography can shape even the clouded gaze—clear at times, fractured at others—exalting the imperfections of our own vision, using this as a resource to delve into the inert, to unravel its hidden movement, and through this, to depict the very contractions the gaze undergoes when faced with what it contemplates.

-Carlos Leiton, review of 33 Suspensions