Tina Enghoff

[...]
 
Double Vision
Arke was ground-breaking in articulating the complex colo­nial relationship between Denmark and Greenland in her art, based on the stake Greenlanders had in its equivocal narratives and representations. Several of her projects are, for example, based on appropriations of the anthropological portraits taken by the Danish doctor Thomas Neergaard Krabbe combined with private photographs of her own family. In her situated research on archives, postcolonial theory, as well as the history of art and science, she highlighted the construction of culture, identity and belonging, demonstrating that history is “the flesh and blood of human beings.”6 Arke’s extensive practice provides a crucial basis for later visual art that underlines the need to constantly re-examine and qualify the history of Greenland’s relationship to Denmark in new, politically conscious forms of representation. Forms that both address the complex relationship of photography to colonisation, and that use photographic representation to generate new narratives.
 
Methodologically Displaced is driven by a range of approaches to photography. First and foremost, the photo­grapher herself goes in and out of the role of investigator, inviting the reader to join her in thinking like a historical detective. Tina Enghoff manifests this strategy as essential in mirroring the injustices of who normally has access to history and its narration – an inequality based on colonialism. David Kristoffersen h…

Over a century ago people travelled here from far-away places to measure the skulls of people already living here. These outsiders were in the surprising habit of holding strange events, which included measuring the heads of the people who turned up. This extraordinary behaviour was met with generosity and cooperation, since nobody wanted to make life more difficult for the visitors. People let them measure their heads, most of them out of sheer kindness, others in exchange for a token gift. Slowly but surely, however, the people discovered that this habit was not based on the particular heads of those that were measured, or whether they were particularly beautiful, thoughtful, radiant or sad. The sole interest of the outsiders was measuring heads. Apart from being different in size, all heads were the same to them. There was no Aqqaluk or Paninnguaq, no Nukapianguaq or Aviaaja. Only heads and skulls.
The people also discovered that this obsessive need to measure heads was a habit the newcomers had developed elsewhere, far from here. And it had stuck, almost becoming part of their soul. But that is what made it an echo. An echo of something somewhere else. It was not based on the heads here. It was a reverberation of something the travellers had already talked about in other places, in other buildings, in other countries.
The outsiders left again, taking the head measurements home with them to the buildings and countries where they had talked about measuring heads before comi…

[...]
 
Archives at a Time of Change – Radical Empathy
David Kristoffersen’s story is an example of why we need to rethink the role of archives in society. Because archives mirror the state or administration whose documents they store, and being confronted by the contents of archives can mean reliving the experience of being under administration, being taken into the care of the authorities, or being displaced by the state. Archives are neither created nor stored with the care of the individual in mind. Historian Ann Laura Stoler, who has specialised in colonial history and the archives of former colonial powers, works with archives as historical documentation and part of the ‘toolbox’ of colonial powers. As she writes: “These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves.”5 As Albie Sachs’ description of the archives in South Africa clearly indicates, the echo of the colonial administrators’ way of thinking and working still resounds in the vaults of the archives.
 
In Displaced we see fishing and hunting records from the area close to Nanortalik. In the Royal Greenland Trade Department registers of what they bought from hunters, the memories of the journeys, the village hunters, the food of childhood, and the feeling of home are severed and remote. One of the lists is the record of David’s father, Elisa Kristoffersen, from David’s birthplace Papikatsuk during the year he was in Denmark…

Photography, crime and punishment are themes with a lot of baggage: action, passion, fury and cunning. Tina Enghoff’s boxset Hate is / Isolation assembles texts and photographs of sites that are recorded calmy in the aftermath of crimes and in the aftermath of punishments. Both books communicate someone else’s turmoil and violence , and both function as reports on flows of hatred, resistance, of troubled damage. These exquisitely produced books operate not as records of events themselves, but on a quieter level, raising troubling questions of process, context and unresolved social schisms.
 
Enghoff uses chronological repetition and evocation of entropy to make us understand cycles of violence and damage, evoking claustrophobia and limits on our sense of action. Hate is shows places, everyday ones. Specificity of place is accompanied by a studious objectivity. The imagery recalls the dispassionate and disenchanted gaze of the New Topographics photographers and of Michael Schmidt.
 
On the first read, the photographs build a landscape closed in around itself, the view constantly mobile between sites notable only for their commenplace nature and the incident number on each page. Hedges hint at labyrinths. The shock comes in the final section of the book. The numbers are revealed as specific kinds of crime, brutal and yet everyday crimes of sexual and racial persecution. Now the reading method changes, back and forth between crime and contex, trying and failing to make any s…

.... Scene 5: Travelling
 
I imagine them standing at the railing on a ferry, the tourists Tina Enghoff has photographed from behind and below so the view ahead of them consists solely of blue skies. That they are arriving in a new, foreign country, or leaving the old one for a while. "The Idea of Travelling". The reality is that they are looking at one of the most famous tourist attractions in Denmark–Edvard Eriksen’s statue Den lille havfrue (The Little Mermaid). That she is a fairytale figure who paid a high price for an impossible desire and for crossing the border between two worlds is true, but Enghoff’s camera lingers not on her but on the bodies turned away from us to face an endless horizon. The figures embody this dream of travelling, a dream that tourist organisations worldwide offer to make come true easily and comfortably. Visit Copenhagen. Dine at our restaurants. Stay at our hotels. See our attractions. Lots of film and photo opportunities. The modern tourist is in transit for pleasure and to return home with experiences, souvenirs and proof that “I was here”. Tourism and the photographic medium are closely linked in the form of both postcards and snapshots in albums. The image should be picturesque, or at least tell a good story. Even if the story is how disappointingly small and unimpressive the statue of the little mermaid was, at least we had a nice ice cream afterwards.
The migrants who come to Denmark on a tourist visa for a whole range of socio-economic …

Copenhagen Photo Festival officially lasted only a week and is over now. But apart from its own programme the well-attended Festival functioned as an umbrealla under which a variety of Copenhagen's exhibition sites housed widely different photographic exhibitions. And several of these will remain open for a long time. One of these is photographer Tina Enghoff's exhibition SEVEN at the National Museum of Photography. A major theme of the Festival's own main exhibition ”Day/Night” was photography which at one and the same time combines the highly staged with the documentary, with a focus on stories and subjects from ”real life”. Something similar describes Tina Enghoff's exhibition which has been made in co-operation with integration consultant Uzma Ahmed Andersen. The exhibition consists of a series of large landscape photographs, with a female figure, made partly anonymous, appearing in each. The photos are beautiful, expressively poetic and very emotionally evocative in their own right; but they furthermore address ”an issue”.
 
Since Danish photographer Jacob A. Riis photographed and wrote about the living conditions among poor immigrants in Manhattan around 1900 and was instrumental in bringing about social reforms to actually better their conditions, it has been this very kind of humanistically oriented documentary photography which Riis helped found that has had a history of and monoply on depicting the life conditions of the down-and-outs and oppressed, while advocating…

Not all photo books are of the coffee-table variety. There are also some with a considerably more modest appearance in which the actual content condenses existence to a few pages. On a book table I spot two slim volumes bound together by a narrow paper ribbon on which the following three questions are written: ”How do we move about in public space? How do we meet each other? Is the city meant for everyone?”
 
The originators of these publications turn out to be to the Swedish-Danish photographers couple Kent Klich and Tina Enghoff, with each their way to relate to the project ”Get Lost”, initiated by themselves and the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen. The project, which took place for a one year period, aimed to investigate the codes creating the city's structures and to discuss territorial and social borders among its inhabitants.
 
Kent Klich is a photographer with a strong commitment to those living on the fringe of society. This could be seen not least in his book ”Picture Imperfect” (reviewed in Svenska dagbladet March 6 2008), which recently received the Swedish Award for Photo Books 2009, as well as in his earlier book ”Children ofCeausescu'”, with a preface by Herta Müller, about Romanian orphans.
 
In his book, called ”Out of Sight”, he has chosen to shed light on some of the more than 3,000 homeless people in Copenhagen. On each of the black pages their names are stated, heaped upon each other to become a tall, swaying tower: Marko, Dennis, Kurt, Robert, Po…