Martina Hoogland Ivanow is, in my opinion, one of the most talented people working in contemporary photography. Her photographs and books are unique. She works in a style that suggests cinema, through color grading and the suggestion of a narrative built from a series of independent film stills. There is a suggestion of motion in her photographs that levitates them up and above the stock and often apathetic type of portraiture we find in much of today’s work in the category. Martina’s portraits rally against deadpan and cold portraits that have been in fashion for nearly three decades. Instead, her work has a flow and is heavily imbued with a psychoanalytical potential to be read as dream states. There is something mythical about the work, and it references esoteric tendencies, which suggests everything from folk horror to late 19th-century images of Bohemian artistry.
The color grading itself makes the dating of her images elusive. It is hard to tell precisely when they were created, even if we know them to be contemporary. There is something of the absinthe about them. Sometimes, the color looks bright and is sci-fi saturated, and at other times, the saturation and grain register similarly to early color experiments, particularly slightly underexposed autochromes. When I think of artists working at the turn of the twentieth century, I might reference artists like F. Holland Day and Alfred Stieglitz. I mention Stieglitz specifically when thinking of his autochromes, particularly the images of his daughter Kitty. I reference F. Holland Day as the strange Christian mysticism in his work; however, homoerotic or durational, the subject matter. Demachy for his overt line. Referencing these artists in the early decades of the twentieth century is to invoke pictorialism.
The pictorialist tradition has long been sequestered away, shunned for its references to painting and set aside to give photography space to reach its point of technical autonomy and appreciation, where the medium would be taken seriously for its characteristics and not the indebtedness it shares with other mediums like painting. I believe a mistake was made in this. Pictorialism or painterly tendencies surface often, and though I see Hoogland Ivanow’s work more indebted to a possible cinema, it would not be unfair to position her work as pictorialist in nature. One might go as far as to argue that symbolist painters like Gustave Moreau and Arnold Böcklin might also be interesting points of reference. I am also reminded of the contemporary drawing by Steven Shearer. By suggesting Shearer, I can also navigate a catalog of painters like Austin Osman Spare and other practitioners of occult and transgressive takes on art. Goya, as referenced in the book, the dismal black Paintings where shadows eat everything around the subject sucking in, like a Lovecraftian void, anything superfluous to the central subjects, is in fact, another great reference.
For further twentieth-century referencing, photographers like Irina Ionesco, though primarily a photographer known for her monochrome pictures, come to mind. In recent times, fellow Swede Maja Daniels has been a good point of reference, as is Claudien Doury, for the esoteric tendencies found in the work. All three of these artists observe rituals in their own way. Thinking through color balance, I could present Alisa Resnik and Laurenz Berges with their downturned dark grading of images. As for the psychedelia that crops up in places, Gareth McConnell and perhaps Chloe Sells are good points of saturated color filter reference. The interiors of Beatrice Minda in her book Dark Whispers (Hartmann Books, 2021) also qualify. Exploring cinema, I come back to Peter Strickland, particularly his films Katalin Varga and, at a stretch, Berberian Sound Studio. In general terms, it would be unfair not to mention Ari Aster’s Midsommar and Tarkovsky bearing some implicit or oblique relationship.
As someone who has followed Martina’s work, I might suggest this to be her best book yet. Although it comprises different projects and series, politely cannibalizing some of her more notable images, run together in their aggregate, there is a profound sense of alarming order to the work. Pieces for Speedway and Circulate co-mingle with her fashion and editorial work, and nobody needs to be the wiser. There is a straightforwardness to the book itself. All pictures are equal and run at full bleed, giving viewers and enthusiasts such as myself a way to interpret Martina’s world holistically. Her world, no matter if it is chasing re-creations of political and ancient events, is not discontinued by her work in Mexico or contemporary Sweden. It presents interests and colliding timelines where time is truly out of joint. In some ways, the territory could be described as fantastique.
Another excellent feature of the book is the end text, in which Martina shares quite a bit about her background. Having spoken to Martina for the Neearest Truth podcast, I had little idea about much of what there is to find in that text. It was illuminating to hear about her educational experiences, experiences in London, and her trip to see Goya’s work, amongst many other things. I guess it helps to know the work in a retrospective light, where a stock-taking of work is inevitable and helps to give a broader shape to the artist and her work. As mentioned previously, I think because of this and the thick volume of images that it presents, that it could be considered, even in its um, her finest book yet, as it gives us the brilliant overview of her work that I feel her hard-to-find books hint at. I would firmly suggest you pick this up. It is one of the year’s finest books so far and will be seen as a testament to a brilliant artist only beginning.
