“Nothing was easy in Nordic life, at least in the easy sense more meridional peoples perceive it“

From here on the fjords of Norway one can better understand – to a deeper and more defining extent – Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly that so contributed to split churches and granular ethics. Nothing was easy in Nordic life, at least in the easy sense more meridional peoples perceive it, at least in the centuries – or millennia – that preceded Norwegian’s oil boom. There weren’t, literally, neither “free lunches” nor the prospect that anything offered away would return in a differently shaped form – human relations were more immediate, and more urgent. In Portugal, the sea is perhaps the only force of nature that will dispose of you without further thought – but in Norway the list is varied and long.

Individualism – somewhat known as selfishness in southern cultures – keeps its name but mutates its concept towards self-reliance. Self-reliance breeds a stronger trust in each other and Norwegians have millennia of trusting each other, a trust that converts nowadays into a strong – probably the strongest – social system. I often wonder if it is scalable, an irrelevant thought in a large country with a mere 5 million inhabitants.

Art can only happen on a full stomach – otherwise survival takes over. As a photographer, especially when I travel to far-away places where stomachs are less full I often think of these things, and how we are yet to express humanity in its full potential form.

This photo is a graphical exercise that I often find impossible to resist: the biased distortion of my thoughts, seen through the precise lens of my camera, translated by the dynamic distortion of the water.