A couple words with Erik Osberg

Who: My name is Erik Osberg. I was born in Vancouver in 1983 and was raised in
Victoria, B.C. I received two BFA's, in film production and photography, from Concordia University in Montreal.



What: I mostly take pictures, but my practice also includes making films and videos. The series in question is an ongoing set of images that I have worked on steadily for the last two and a half years.



When: I started taking pictures in 2003 with a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic. Then I
learned of medium format and bought a Kalimar Six/Sixty. Concurrently, I had become interested in motion picture and had bought a Nikon R10 super to shoot rolls of super 8mm. At the time I was going to the University of Victoria and decided that I wanted to be an artist, so I transferred to Concordia and started art school in 2005.



Where: This series contains pictures taken in a few locations in Canada. I carry my camera with me if I travel, but don’t tend to take very many pictures. My partner is Turkish and I have visited there a couple of times and taken pictures in the town that she is from, but at this point consider those images a different set of work. I think this series could handle images taken anywhere and that eventually the Turkish pictures could find inclusion, but without a very particular balance, including signifiers from other cultures may generate a sloppy dualism.



Why: I think photography and writing are very similar, in so far as their various forms and traditions are simultaneously concrete and elastic. There are people who make genre-based work: romance, sci-fi, biography, portrait, landscape, journalism, etc. And there is an audience of people who expect these genres, as well (imagine yourself working in a used bookstore being barked at about the whereabouts of How the Scots Invented the Modern World, or going to your parent’s friends house who have a framed poster of the Avedon picture of the woman and the elephants). But there are also people who have ideas and proceed to work them out using one of the numerous known forms available, or an amalgam of various forms. All this to say that contemporary cultural production may be presented in a relatively unlikely package, which is probably pretty obvious. I have ideas that I want to make public and I work them out most commonly with pictures.



How: Usually I take pictures using a 4x5 camera, since I tend to make large prints. Upon exposing and developing, I scan the film and work digitally thereafter.



Erik doesn't have a website yet, but the internet sucks anyways so don't worry about it.

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