A City Behind The Forest
Edition of 450
23 x 30 cm
184 pages
Hard cover
Published by Witty Books, Oct 2021
ISBN 979-12-80177-06-3
Albert Grøndahl
48,00 €
A City Behind the Forest presents an alluring study of the psychiatric environment at Aarhus Psychiatric Hospital in Denmark. It emerges from Albert Grøndahl's photographic work and texts, as well as Museum Ovartaci´s collection of artworks created by patients of the hospital in the period 1852 -2018. ( A museum of art and psychiatry, placed within the hospital).
In the book, Albert Grøndahl's interpretation is intertwined with the museum's archive in a documentary study of the inner and outer reality of the hospital.
This, together with a historically in-depth look, give us an insightful perspective for posterity on a place that has now disappeared. The book has been awarded with the Hasselblad Foundation's Photobook Grant.
Albert Grøndahl (b. 1985, Copenhagen) is inspired by the raw aesthetics of classical documentarism and its ethos of personal presence, photography’s narrative potential is an interest in his work. But not in terms of the logics of straightforward storytelling or the effort to illustrate preconceived and abstract notions, but in the sense that the images may point to a person’s inner life and to the hidden secrets of a place, its cultural meaning or private connotations. His work tends to dissolve the distance between the eye engaging in interpretation and the objects of his poetic and obscure investigations of emotional truth and intensified human encounters.
Studied, 2013- 2014 MFA, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerpen,
2011- 2012 Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Photografie, Arles
2009 -2012 BA, FAMU Department of Photography, Academy of Performing Arts, Prague.