I came to photography relatively late in my life. After high school, I went travelling for 18 months. Despite a very tight travel budget, I bought my first SLR camera and had to live on rice and bananas for a while. The camera became my key to meeting the world. I would explore places that I would not have had the guts to enter, and approach strangers that my young shy self would not have dared to confront without a camera around my neck.

My formal and stylistic influences come from painting, cinema, and literature, and most of my projects are investigations of themes I am passionate about, or rediscoveries of things I was interested in during my childhood and youth. They allow me to go in depth with anything that resonates with me at a given time.

I have always been drawn to photographing creative people. Portraiture has always been a collaborative effort for me, and I love creating something with others. Sometimes, the collaboration is creative – other times more on an energy level. I have really enjoyed collaborations where you can feel the energy and the creative touch of both photographer and subject in the final work. Some good examples of this would be my work with The White Stripes, Björk and Spanish street artist Borondo.

I believe that my own inner state has a strong influence on the energy of my subject. For 10 years, starting in the late nineties, I photographed meditating yogis on a mountain top in Rajasthan, (India). Prior to taking the portraits, I meditated with the yogis and took them whilst we were both in meditation. The resulting images transmit a strong spiritual energy. This was an experience that I brought with me to my portraits of cultural personalities in the West. I always try to inspire trust and be on a high energy level prior to a shoot.

That is all a question of gut feeling and experience. I used to be more unsure when I was starting out. These days I feel very sure when I know I have got it. Of course, digital photography has also helped this process. Back in the analogue days you had to trust your process more.

I think a portrait expresses the subject and the photographer. I am trying to evoke how I feel inside – whether I photograph a yogi, an actor, or a swarm of birds. I am hoping that the feelings I transmit through my photographs exceed my personal life and take on a universal energy that any human being can relate to.

In 2017, I was working on a 25-year retrospective portrait book and exhibition at Frederiksborg Castle, The National Portrait gallery in Denmark. I was going through all my portraits for a year and decided that I wanted to do a new project that was not about portraiture.
The first thing that came to my mind was an image of a big flock of starlings I had seen flying in intriguing formations as a 10 year old. I decided to go to the Wadden Sea on the Danish West Coast where starling murmuration takes place in spring and fall. Initially, it was all about practicalities like locating the birds and learning about their behavior. On the seventh night I was there, I witnessed a large flock of starlings getting attacked by a peregrine falcon. The shapes and formations the flock created, in order to scare off the attacking bird of prey, blew my mind. Beautiful, dramatic, and resembling a Japanese ink drawing or a piece of calligraphy.
For the next 2 years, I spent my time in that area whenever the birds were there. After the second year, I started following the birds as they migrated South and West, and thus expanded the project to five other countries: Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Black Sun is a literal translation of the name used for a starling murmuration in Danish. It refers to a phenomenon when hundreds of thousands of starlings cover the sky and the sun and block out the sunlight. It can be a very dramatic experience to witness.

I used social media a lot to track down the birds. I followed various starling hashtags and would then get in contact with people who photograph starlings across Europe. Sometimes, I would see an image from a foreign country one day and be in the same spot the next evening. One of the hardest technical aspects of this project has been the fact that a lot of the action happens in very low light making it very hard to photograph in high quality.

I have been photographing starlings for 4 years to finalise the Black Sun book, but I am not done yet. I am still deeply fascinated and feel like I have a lot more to discover

I will generally focus on nature and spirituality in my future work. That feels right at this point in my life. Next trip will be to Catalonia this summer to try to capture fireflies, and hopefully a trip to Bhutan to photograph monks and nature.