"If a picture merely is beautiful, I cannot stand looking at it", says Danish photographer Astrid Kruse Jensen in this interview presenting her work. "We are never allowed to rest in the harmonious ".

We met Astrid Kruse Jensen (b. 1975) at Brandts Klædefabrik in Odense for her show "Disappearing into the Past" which included the video "The house inside her" from 2011, a cooperation with documentary filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær.

Astrid Kruse Jensen talks about how she has always been drawn to photography because of its dependency on reality. She considers her own work "a poetic transposition of reality". Contrary to the traditional understanding of photography as capturing a moment, Kruse Jensen tries to create and re-shape moments in front of her camera, thereby "turning something fleeting into something lasting".

People play an important role in the work of Astrid Kruse Jensen, even though she never portrays them in the traditional sense. "A direct confrontation says less about them, than a suggestion or a fragment. I want the viewer to complete the story," Kruse Jensen says.

As an artist and photographer Astrid Kruse Jensen works with analogue photography, and has a fondness of the chemistry of the darkroom. Even though many of her earlier pictures are very intense in color, Kruse Jensen never uses Photoshop in post-production. In her latest works though, she has not wanted to control every detail in the artistic process. The series "Disappearing into the past" was shot on old Polaroid-film. Thus, on many pictures the traces of time are obvious, leading to motives on top of the motives. "I have always been interested in memory and how we remember things. And like our own memory, theses motives are - because of the chemistry - in constant motion and change over time", Kruse Jensen says. The series "Disappearing into the Past" thus looks more poetic than earlier works by Astrid Kruse Jensen. "But only at first sight", she says. "The more you look at them, the more disturbing elements you find."

Astrid Kruse Jensen was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at Brandts Klædefabrik in Odense, Denmark.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken

Produced by: Jakob Solbakken and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2013.

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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