Jim Bengston, my uncle, has a new show. Most of these images are from the three months of any year Jim spends traveling the US in his Airstream (he’s originally from Illinois, but has lived in Oslo since the 70s) but there are a few from times and places I recognise, like the one from New Years Eve in Berlin (we all climbed the Teufelsberg, a hill made from all the rubble left in the city after WW2).
Jim spent a significant chunk of all our childhoods turning family photos into art – as they say: “disse bildene hadde familien og venner som tema” – which were published in two books Afterwords and Slow Motion.
Slow Motion’s cover is an image of my feet, and as a kid I always enjoyed the fact that this image is in the collection of the MOMA in New York City. Mind you, considering they have 25,000 works dating from approximately 1840 to the present and constituting one of the most important collections of photography in the world, it’s not as if I’m ever going to go there and see it on the wall. But I have it on my wall at home, and that’s what counts.