Erik Gustafsson, A House of Clay, 2024

The birdsong of everyday life interacts with the cycles of creation and destruction of the darkroom in Gustafsson’s expressive monograph.

In A House of Clay, Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a principle of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning in and take seriously the smallest events of ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder towards consciousness, perception and feeling. At times excessively normal, at others tender and intimate, at others dense and complex, Gustafsson’s warm slices of life are digested in the darkroom, where the technical processes of photography fold in on themselves, becoming an integral part of the image: cycles of photography, printing, failure, rules of dodging, repetition and scanning.

Balanced between consciousness and coincidence, Gustafsson’s moments of magic realism speak of a permanence, a perpetual present, in which the continuously unfinished image can always be, at a later stage, altered, manipulated and rewritten. In A House of Clay, even the finiteness of the printed page is punctured; images flicker and rotate on the page, sequences accumulate and pile up intoxicated by visual (dis)associations, only to dissolve and fold, the print once again immersed in chemicals, the house of clay reshaped anew.