Closer

Louise Enhorning’s work has an inherent feminine sensitivity that eschews sentimentality or cliché. The images she makes are beautiful and uplifting, and compelling in their embrace of imperfection. The women she depicts are engaged and individual. They are beauties, but they are not stereotypes. It is the strength of their individualism that makes them captivating. She has an aesthetic is difficult to define as it is richly layered and informed by art history, music, design and colour theory. Her work is painterly, and sculptural; it sings and it speaks, far beyond the frame. In her first book made in collaboration with Nina Andersson, Swedish Girls, the focus was on an intimate and honest insight into a particular femininity, familiar to the authors. For this individual project, Louise shot images in Paris and LA over a period of three months. After a period returning to the influences which first inspired her as a photographer, she was compelled to explore other possibilities of the medium. The resulting collection of images that comprise Closer, see the artist expand her focus beyond portraiture, and include still life, abstraction and landscape. These subjects are approached with the same sensitivity as her flesh-and-blood models. There is no hierarchy between portraits and still life; between the structure of a hairstyle and the shape of a tropical fruit. Tall standing, lush tropical leaves; the unique texture of an ostrich egg in black and white; are approached with the same sensitivity and respect as limbs and faces, skin and hair. When shooting portraits, Louise always works to establish a closeness with her models. This relationship extends also to her collaborators, and the physical environment. It is evident in her work, as the viewer gets the sense that the finished frame is a small part of the process – of a greater interaction and relationship. The models she shoots are engaged and alive, not passive or ornamental. Likewise her still life’s have a tension and tactility – there is a sense of before and after, of movement rather than stasis. Closer is a collection of encounters between photographer and subject; of light and shadow, of colour and gradient, of texture and shape. As viewers, we are invited to experience this closeness, the delicacy and the intimacy. These images celebrate these moments of inspired and spirited interaction. There is a sense of photography freed from construction, a lightness and a feeling of elation – a closeness between photographer and subject, and viewer.