Women Care
Morten Krogvold
NORWAY

Krogvold blends distance with intimacy, minimalism with maximum impact. The women appear amid landscapes or alone against a neutral backdrop with their faces functioning as landscapes. But they never stray far from the core of Morten Krogvold’s characteristic signature: His sense of form.

Krogvold experienced indifference in Bosnia. He found a gipsy woman on the street with a 13-hour-old baby. She had been expelled from the delivery room after a Caesarean operation because she had no health insurance. No photo was taken. It was one of the occasions on which he failed to find the distance necessary to create a buffer of indifference, or its twin: cynicism.

“In Srebrenica 9000 men were executed during a few weeks in the summer of 1995. Everything collapsed afterwards. The desolation remains. I photographed one of the women who still sit among the ruins.”

Kvinner Care is a collection of fates and fortunes like that of the woman suffering in the ruins. Or like the leper from Niger’s deserts, where Krogvold discovered an abundance of love and joy. Or like the young beauty he met in Thailand, on her way to Hollywood and a career as a model. In Peru he found women with fists like Mike Tyson’s, by the banks of the Amazon he found them delicate and sensual. In Asia he met labourers who carry sand and stone from morning to night for a pittance.

“She had no other choice. Her back was like concrete, just like the bridge towering over her. The bridge to another life she could not reach.”

He has photographed a woman and child in one of Pol Pot’s torture chambers, where children were tortured and photographed. Morten Krogvold photographed the photographs. Lest we forget.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh he found hell on earth beside a railway line. A place where 5000 people live, eat, give birth and die as express trains thunder by. They live amid their own waste, without water or electricity, without work and almost without food. But inconceivably, even here, they have hope – a little.

Tom Hatlestad and Kevin Reeder