Experts from the text by Mikkel Bogh

The photographs of Jeanette Land Schou feature numerous examples of how limitation, cropping and reduced accessibility can intensify the visible, strengthening the sensation that the physical world we experience is permeated by possible connections, questions, notions, atmospheres, ideas and other immaterial entities. 

We find ourselves in a universe of images where things are never confronted directly. The motifs - if this concept is even applicable here - do not appear as a constellation of delimited, identifiable objects and shapes but are constituted by interchanges between foreground and background and relations between what is inside and outside our field of vision. In order to see one thing we must pass through another. Insight is limited by the foreground coming between viewer and background. The bushes, branches and shrubberies form a kind of filter; a thicket grudgingly admitting access to the forms beyond - often buildings and other traces of human presence. In some images the roles are reversed: Here the foreground is the main motif while the shifting nuances of black in the background - occasionally illuminated by pale rays of natural light - approach us with an almost importunate form of  inaccessibility. In both cases there is a negotiation of visibility: a tradeoff. The house beyond the thicket appears to have no clearly defined, independent contours; its outline and dimensions are barely distinguishable. Yet the blurring is compensated by an intensity occasioned precisely by this partial erasure, which simultaneously emphasizes a sense of abandonment.
In another picture the thorny, flash-lit foreground branches are neither in focus nor centrally positioned in the image field, which is dominated by impenetrable woods obscuring the contours of a large building in front of a dimly lit sky.

As the gaze negotiates the painful passage they frame and moves into the space of the image the effect is all the greater. Such repoussoir-figures - i.e. foreground figures intended to create a sense of depth by leading the gaze into the image - are commonly used in both classic and modern painting and photography. In Jeanette Land Schou’s work, however, the repoussoir-effect works a little differently. Here the foreground figure provides more of an obstacle to the gaze; it becomes a hurdle, creating confusion and denying the viewer any form of overview and clarity. Rather than being led gently into the depth of the image, the gaze of the viewer is severely tried. Yet this is no obstacle race for a prize at the finishing line. There is no question of arriving at some deep, actual, underlying motif, but rather of being able to explore a space in which values and hierarchies have been turned around; a space where what initially appears peripheral and banal may turn out to be quite central; where the perspectival axis along which the gaze must wander does not necessarily lead to any points of interest. Above all else we discover that these points are not in fact points at all, nor are they objects or isolated events. The places depicted achieve their particular character, their texture, their peculiar mode of visibility, through the constellation of elements in the image and the interplay between the accessible and the inaccessible.

It may appear obvious that photographs do not merely register and document the visible world but actually construct visibility. Photographic images do not freeze what the photographer has seen to give us viewers the possibility of experiencing it once again. They are created by the photograph and exist only in this place, this image. Even if we can find the actual place at which the image was taken, locating practically every component of the image in the real world, the photograph would still constitute the frame. What we saw would appear as an image precisely because of the photograph. In Jeanette Land Schou’s work shots which appear to be taken at night are actually taken in broad daylight. Add to this that the cropping specific to each individual image - controlling the relationship between seen and unseen - functions as an artificial frame that does not refer to any natural ocular tendency. Instead of relating to a constant, binocular motion it refers to the technical possibilities offered by the equipment. Yet these conditions do not present a limitation vis-à-vis the equipment, nor do they constitute a reduction in relation to other forms of image production and reproduction such as film or painting. Photographs have a unique ability to grasp and hold the world in transition from visual experience to image. The processes of framing and cropping make things come together and relate to one another; connections and significances are formed within the frame of the image. Prior to the existence of the photograph these associations were present in the visible world purely as a form of unrealized potential. Thus the buildings and remains hiding behind the tangled shrubbery and treetops are not to be seen as hidden, semi-accessible motifs but as parts of an image in which all components are valued in relation to one another thereby contributing to the overall composition.

These buildings do more than merely lose themselves behind the branches; they communicate with their surroundings. Photographic images possess an ability to create correspondences between things that might - outside the photograph - be experienced as utilitarian, functional or entirely insignificant objects. In the photograph, however, they are drawn into a communication that instantly changes their status, charging them with value or emptying them so utterly of recognizability that it opens up an abyss of potential.  One might say that photographs are surreal by nature: There is an evident - if frequently overlooked - connection between metaphysics and this medium that so eminently transforms and ascribes value to the visible world.  The particular dedication to the art of photography displayed by the surrealists of the 1920s and 30s must surely be ascribed to this inherent option of relieving the world of familiarity  and replacing it with other - frequently disconcerting - forms of intimacy.

Mikkel Bogh former headmaster of the Royal Academy of fine Arts In Denmark, director of the National Gallery of Denmark.