Aesthetics is contagious

In addition to my yearlong involvement with the X-Pro3 project which you can read about in my 5200+ word run-through HERE , I was given a chance to do a video on my photography.
Obviously centered around the X-Pro3, I really tried to do a video that was more about a part of my photography than the product itself.

I wanted to do a take on Aesthetics, Danish architecture, and my love for minimalistic street photography. That seemed to go hand in hand with the new simplified design cues of the X-Pro3.

I did the project together with my good friend, and insanely talented photographer, videographer and musician Palle Schultz. 

Below you can find the original article as it appears on Fujifilm-x.com. I really like the layout Fujifilm did for it, so you can also go read it there. If you want to go there instead, the link is HERE

Aesthetics is contagious

Seeking isolation, seeking simplicity. That has been the driving force behind my photography the past couple of years. I want to reduce the visual clutter. I want to reduce the content within my images until all that reside is pure and crucial to the story within the frame.

This constant search for simplicity has transformed my photography and has pushed it into a much more stringent and graphical direction. The way I see it, is that street photography doesn’t always have to be about documenting your surroundings. For me it has become much more than that. It has become my artistic expression of form, function, light, and human presence.
Street photography to me is no longer just documentary photography. It’s my interpretation of my surroundings. It’s my art.

I think the more I reduce the content in my frames, the more powerful my visual art becomes. It demands attention. It demands focus. It demands that the viewer observe the image and let their imagination run free. The absence of defining content in the frame is what should catch the viewers attention, and let them fill out the canvas with their own imagination. Absence is a powerful presence.

Being based in Denmark, this stringent minimalistic and graphical vision is all around me. As a country, Denmark has an extraordinary architectural cultural heritage, and walking around the city of Aarhus or Copenhagen constantly inspires me to find, and photograph, new angles and representations of these great works of art that the people of Denmark use as a backdrop for their day-to-day existence.
I find it quite interesting to mix the biological human presence with the raw non-organic architecture that is the city. It is quite interesting to me to observe and record what happens within those boundaries.

So, is my photography architectural? is it street photography? Is it fine art? I don’t know, and I honestly don’t care.

Photography is photography IS photography – That is what matters.

The X-Pro3 as a concept, and as a tool, share this minimalist approach towards its own existence with my photography. It has been reduced to pure photography. It has become a tool where superfluous functions are no longer present, and additions are there to serve a very specific purpose.
The X-Pro3 demands your attention, it demands your focus.

The X-Pro3 is designed with a very clear functional and visual aesthetic in mind. An aesthetic so well thought out that when I hold the camera in my hands it gives me the absolute urge to go and create my art.
It stays true to its legacy like no other digital Fujifilm camera before it. The X-Pro3 isn’t trying to be a film camera, it is a modern day digital camera with a classical visual appearance. The added focus on film-simulations and in-camera editing tools is a very clear statement from Fujifilm to even simplify the post-processing needs to a bare minimum.

In essence its functions and aesthetics is contagious.