Collected from over fifteen years of work, THE ENDLESS SPHERE OF TIME showcases the photography of Geir Jordahl, much of it on the coasts or in the mountains of North America. Rejecting typical rectangular formats, Jordahl’s works here are round, evoking cameos, peepholes, and convex mirrors. Accompanied by the poems of Rolf Jacobsen, the text is a thoughtful, flowing rumination on what is impermanent and what is eternal.

Jordahl’s round frames offer some simple but effective compositional interest. The rectangular frame is so standardized that most viewers don’t respond to it at all. Here, however, internal aspects of the composition are augmented by the circular shape. Often, the most interesting moments see strong, straight lines contrasting with the curve of the frame: a church sitting dead on the horizon line with a cubical hay bale in the foreground; the strong parallel lines of a pine forest; the masts of a stranded ship pointing askew into the sky and reflected perfectly in the water. Jordahl’s frames aren’t just round; they’re also wide-angle (“fisheye”), and this can profoundly accentuate the round shapes of a composition. The interior of a spiral staircase, for instance, approaches Möbius-strip levels of geometric recursion; and in one powerful image, trees in a forest all seem to twist actively toward the sun like massive sunflowers.

Although these spheres and circles are the most evident devices, Jordahl’s other technical interests poke through. Frequent use of greater-than-normal exposure lengths gives water an unusually sedate quality, turning babbling brooks and churning waterfalls into processions of otherworldly mist. Furthermore, all of the images are greyscale. This mutes some of the energy (especially considering that almost all of the images appear to be naturally lit), but it also contributes a surprising amount of texture, and therefore visual interest. The chiaroscuro adds crags to old stone, depth to forest foliage, and life to the veins of leaves. Combined with the longer exposures, it too smudges the boundaries between the impermanent and the endless.

Jacobsen’s poetry (trans. Roger Greenwald) provides tasteful accompaniment, often as thoughtful and still as the images. Small, spiky phrases erupt at times—especially in pops of color, like the “red sail” of a butterfly’s wing, or ants “[flaring] up like a blush” from the earth— adding in their own ways to the visual interest of the overall work. The images themselves, however, always take rightful pride of place.

Geir Jordahl and Rolf Jacobsen’s THE ENDLESS SPHERE OF TIME is a soft, surreal, and serene vision of eternity.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader