Ⅰ ABOUT THE EXHIBITION – INTRODUCTION

The Imperfect Atlas is the first solo exhibition at Fotografisk Center by Danish photographer and visual artist Peter Funch (b. 1974). The exhibition is a Gesamtkunstwerk with an overall expression and a rethinking of works and materials about man, nature, culture, and climate. The exhibition consists of three significant works that conceptually and thematically weave in and out of each other. The central title work, The Imperfect Atlas (2014-16), primarily spatial, and the multi-channel projection on Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Vol. 02 (2024), which unfolds temporally. In the far corner of the exhibition is the first instalment of a brand new series, Paradise(2024). The aesthetic of Paradise is inspired by Kikuji Kawada’s (b. 1938, JP) book Chizu(The Map) from 1965, which takes a close look at the reminiscences of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. In its entirety as an exhibition, The Imperfect Atlas is an impressive journey through the industrial age, the age of photography, and the human imprint on the world, where Funch mixes old and new formats such as RGBprints, newspaper clippings, his own digitalphotographs, found photographs, hand-coloured postcards, and documentation of historical objects with works presented as projections, framed photographs on walls and tables, and aninstallation of large formats mounted on scaffoldingin the centre of the exhibition space. In the exhibition, Peter Funch couples the attention towards nature with photography, industry, and climate change, and the narrative therefore finds its natural starting point at the beginning of the second industrial revolution. It was during those years that photography was invented and industrialisation really took off. Since the dawn of industrial society, we humans have behaved as if the world’s resources were freely available for every whim and imaginable development, as if nature were our stooge to manage freely, but with industrialisation, however, we reached a tipping point of how much we can consume and destroy with impunity. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, US) – whose influential book has lent its title to Peter Funch’s projection – sensed this, and we now know it with far greater certainty. Thus, Thoreau is the anchor point for the entire exhibition, but Funch’s impressive sampling and activation of our shared visual memory draw on a fount of inspiration. Funch’s motivic and thematic approaches oscillate between direct borrowing, re-photographing, or pastiches of historical material and discreet samples from thought-provoking impressions of everyday Life. Thematically, Peter Funch’s diverse interests merge with his personal concern for global warming and reflections on the human aspect of climate change. For 11 years, he has worked with the international charity Project Pressure and has become far more aware of his impact on the world, as a consumer and as an artist. The works on display encapsulate the friction between rural and urban areas, and his private balance between the spheres of nature and culture, which seem to intertwine more and more. He is driven by his curious interest in his surroundings, and he likes to zoom in to examine something in depth – and his brilliant ability to focus and unfold his series of works over time enriches the current exhibition. Just like Thoreau had many different intertwined agendas in Walden, Funch finds a plethora of themes and turns motifs into visual stream-of-consciousness mashups with both seriousness and dry wit. The hundreds of photographs constitute a visual odyssey that seems to plunge us into the centre of Funch’s quirky brain, condensing several years, places, and situations in a confluence of time: past, present, future, and simultaneously act as a temporal expansion of the mind. The visual memory and the vast bank of images liberate his photographs from limiting concepts and categories; the meanings of what we see are not simple and unambiguous. Funch’s stream of images resists our preconceived notions of the world. In glimpses, he shows us new paths to other perspectives on it. Funch presents different perspectives that at first glance may appear to bediametrically opposed – such as the idea of climate change – but one is not necessarily better than the other. It is just different. Each of us is trapped in a human worm’s-eye view; trapped in time and space. We are bound by our nature –the fact that we are nature – so can we continue to assert ourselves at the expense of other species? Funch’s sensitivity to nature seems to insist on equal worth, which, like Thoreau, translates into an embrace and appreciation of the diversity of nature and the world, while morally placing man in nature and not above it. The new work series Paradise (2024)seems to ask whether it is time to take a more humble approach. If anything good has come out of the climate crisis, we are encouraged to rethink our place in and treatment of the world seriously.

Ⅱ THE IMPERFECT ATLAS – A WORLD IN TURMOIL

Peter Funch has rethought and expanded the exhibition’s central title work, The Imperfect Atlas (2014-16), so that it appears in a completely new configuration, specifically for Fotografisk Center. The work calls for a new mode of orientation in the world. What first catches our eye are probably the large, colourful landscape photographs and the striking metal skeleton on which they are installed. Between the bars, we can glimpse impressive mountainscapes, and as we move around, new ones come into view, while others are hidden or blocked. This particular staging of our movement through space emphasises the temporal dimension of the interaction with the work, and on closer inspection, we sense a time that lies beyond the concrete duration here and now.

Peter Funch photographed these vast mountainscapes during expeditions he undertook to North Cascades National Park, in Washington State near Seattle (USA), over a three-year period from 2014-16. But unlike the crisp black and white landscape photographs of photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984), which embody our contemporary perceptionof how the magnificence of American natureshould be depicted, Peter Funch takes us evenfurther back in time; to a time that none of ushave lived long enough to remember; when onetechnical invention after another transformedthe world we live in; when the West went froman agricultural to an industrial society, andman really left his mark on the world; the timethat makes today’s way of Life possible; thetime that made photography possible.In terms of photographic technology, we are taken back to the early, experimental years of the photographic medium: not to the very beginning with Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833, FR) and Louis Daguerre (1787-1851, FR), but to 1861. This is when the first colour photograph became a reality in the hands of English photographer and inventor Thomas Sutton (c. 1819-1875, GB), based on the theories of Scottish scientist and father of electronics, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879, GB). The method Sutton invented, andwhich Funch re-discovered for his project, is RGB separation. In practice, this means taking three separate photographs, each with a coloured filter in red, yellow, or blue, respectively, and then combining them into one image. As such, it is quite handheld. Any shaking or movement creates shifts between the individual color layers, which Funch effectively uses to draw attention to the person behind the camera by deliberately creating a kind of visual touch of unreality to the landscapes. Nature takes on an almost magical aura or a dreamlike quality, as if there really were spirits on the mythical mountain and iconic cone volcano of the North Cascades, Mount Rainier.In connection with the publication of The Imperfect Atlas in book form (2019), Peter Funch explained that the RGB separation symbolizes human intervention in nature.1 Motive and method, therefore, go hand in hand to some extent.The original series of works originated from an idea to document changes in nature caused by humans. And as a photographer and climate artist, it made sense to follow a didactic path and, by comparing historical and contemporary images, to point out man-made climate change through visible differences in the size of glaciers, as several scientists and artists had done before him. With this goal in mind, Funch began extensive research and tracked down several old postcards from the North Cascades.But along the way, the project grew into something other and more than mere documentation.Examples of the postcards, articles, and nature descriptions Funch found are included in the exhibition. They create a quite colourful narrative about man’s relationship with and ideas about nature and man’s own place in the world.And on the periphery of the climate narrative, he creates space for dialogue.The centuries-long resistance to recognizing climate change has taken various forms.Funch includes climate denial with a few newspaper clippings and archive photos of electronics professor and glaciologist Arthur Elliot Harrison (1908-1976, US), who apparently ‘proved’ that the Earth was moving towards a new ice age rather than catastrophic global warming. Harrison’s findings have been dismissed in scientific circles for poor data, but his message still circulates in various guises. With the inclusion of Harrison’s material, Funch highlights a kind of absurd contradiction when it comes to our ideas about our place in the world and our relationship with the planet and nature. On the one hand, the vast majority of people behave as if they are above nature. On the other hand, it is argued that we are too insignificant to contribute to climate change and too incapable of doing anything about it. Maybeit’s just inconvenient to have to change our habits. But can we afford not to? Funch’s special eye for the inappropriate behavior and mentality of modern humans – asexpressed through actions, gestures, attitudes, and life choices – is strongly inspired by the famous social thinker, author, naturalist, philosopher, and activist Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862, US). Both are at the center of a world in turmoil. Thoreau was skeptical of the industrialisation and commercialization of nature in his own time. Funch displays a similar uneasiness with an approach that seems as kaleidoscopic and all-inclusive as Thoreau’s literary masterpiece Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which has also lent its title to the exhibition’s second series of works. They both oppose human anthropocentrism and bring nature to the forefront of our consciousness.

Ⅲ WALDEN – MAN IN NATURE

The surface of the Earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men, and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! 2- Henry David Thoreau The second series of works and an important key to understanding the exhibition is Peter Funch’s multi-channel projection Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Vol. 02 (2024). The title is borrowed from the great American novel by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, US), whose influence on contemporary humanistic thought is immense. The influence on Funch himself runs as an underlying layer generating meaning throughout the exhibition. Thoreau was a poet, author, surveyor, naturalist, civil rights activist, and transcendentalist. The latter meant that he believed that there was something greater than man in nature, and that nature was animated, so that every animal, bird, fish, insect, seed, plant, lake, meadow, or mountain had an inherent value. The same was true of the landscape painters of his time, known as the Hudson River School, who have also inspired Peter Funch.They shared a scepticism towards the technical advances of industrialisation, which cut nature into manageable and efficient pieces and thus also diminished the world. Funch’s Walden bombards us with around 400 frames in an almost kaleidoscopic mashup of images taken over 25 years and uses the sheer volume to open the horizon beyond the single subject. Funch takes us on a journey through cityscapes and landscapes. We go from a bird’s eye view to a worm’s eye view and zoom from panoramic overviews to close-ups. Some subjects are clearly defined, while others are blurred, underexposed, overexposed, directly backlit, or with a skewed colouring from artificial indoor lighting. The flow of images creates surprising associations and establishes almost synaesthetic connections between foam-topped waves, volcanic eruptions, glaciers, and man-made architecture, plants, and marine Life, illuminating our unstable relationship with nature.By deliberately activating and levelling the dimensions of the objects, Funch’s image archive creates dynamic leaps of scale that split the experience, making us feel simultaneously huge and infinitely small.The overwhelming sensory saturation becomes almost too much. Our neurons go into overdrive trying to make rational connections.It is dizzying, and perhaps we reach an experience of the sublime through the feeling of overstimulation. A transcendence of everyday Life, a loss of control. On the threshold of the other, we are led back to nature with an image of a flower.Today, most people in the West have moved away from nature. It has become alien. Instead of being a place we inhabit, it has become a concept and a curiosity to be tamed and fenced off. Reserves for nature are called national parks, but biodiversity is in decline and far from all rewilding projects succeeding because the space is too cramped for the species to thrive.’ Wild nature is now a place where humans have to lend a helping hand. The untouched no longer exists, although the myths are still alive. Many city dwellers’ notions of nature are increasingly limited to a narrowly defined quality of each country, each nation, as handed down to us through the romantic landscape tradition of historical painting that still haunts and shapes us today.Concurrently with the emergence of industrial society and its accelerating movement from the countryside to the city, wild nature has become indistinct or completely absent from many people’s lives. In Funch’s Walden, nature creeps into our lives and buildings; it separates them more or less efficiently, Life of production at work from our leisure life at home, on holidays, and in the cultivated form of physical activity defined by athletic rules. However, there are strange overlaps. There is a strange ‘nature‘ at work here. ‘Nature‘ on wallpaper, in pots, and on dust bins; the contrast to wild nature is great.Nature in our time is even more beleaguered than in Thoreau’s time.Both through his own photographs and by referring back to Thoreau, Peter Funch draws our attention to the fact that environmental awareness and climate concern are not new phenomena. Motivationally, an important example can be found in photographs of trampled paths through nature. The path is a simple yet powerful analogy for people’s impact on nature. It turns parallel to the changing views of nature throughout art history, from the pastoral scenes of natural romanticism, through the land art pioneers of the 1960s, to Peter Funch today.The most obvious and straightforward reference has to be Richard Long’s (b. 1945, GB)groundbreaking conceptual walking performance, A Line Made by Walking (1967), handed down to us through his own documentary photography. It is a seminal work in the land art movement, in conceptual art, and in minimalism. Personally, he defined the work as sculpture in an expansion of the concept of the work, and the photographic documentation blurred the boundaries of where the ‘locus‘ of the work actually was, and what the work actually consisted of. The precedent he set for making the travelled distance a function of time and place is repeated in Funch’s photographs of paths trodden in nature.But in Funch’s work, it is unclear who hastrodden the paths, and returning to Thoreau, it becomes both more and less important in the way he generalises his observations from the concrete path in front of his cabin to the mental paths we establish that define us as people and the way we act in and treat the world.

IV PARADISE – ART AND OTHER CATASTROPHES

Ideas of paradise stretch so far back in human history that no one knows where they originated. The great religions promise us deliverance from the hardships of Life, the ennui of everyday Life, disease, and hunger, and that has, of course, left its mark in all forms of art. When Peter Funch deals with this here, it is from a different angle than the usual ones. Stories about Paradise can be seen in art, such as ancient pastoral images of happy Arcadia and the later reinterpretations of the same motifs in the European Renaissance and Rococo. At least in the later depictions, Arcadia is interpreted as something unattainable on Earth. Happiness and harmony were to be found in the afterlife. The reality for most people is harsh and dirty. But in the mid-1800s, when industrialization was flourishing and Thoreau built his cabin in the woods, you could go to America to seek happiness. America was seen as a Paradise, flowing with milk and honey. Every immigrant sought happiness, but for many, dreams of Paradise were drowned in poverty. However, you were free – and almost obliged – to seek happiness in wealth. Thoreau was sceptical about this type of happiness. The fact that society oriented itself towards looking rich and chasing the latest fashion created an artificial need for consumption. In his view, the commercialisation of Life restricted Life itself and reduced people to such an extent that: “[…] men have become the tools of their tools.” 3 Instead of being set free, both high and low had been enslaved by their own desires as the slave driver. It may also serve as a cautionary tale for today’s hunt for the latest fad and unconstrained enthusiasm for technology. In recent years, a counter-trend has indeed grown, one that strives to simplify Life or live a happy life in the countryside. For Thoreau and the Hudson River School painters of his time, the real wealth was to be found in nature. But for us, that nature no longer exists.

In a raging sea of flames. The population went from 26,000 to 0 in a single night. The town is now slowly being rebuilt, and hopes for a new paradise are flourishing again. The climate disasters we see today pave the way for counter-movements against modern consumer culture and the prevailing paradigm of growth. But can you ask people not to rebuild? Peter Funch visited Paradise and created a new series of works titled Paradise (2024). The 15 black and white photographs in 4:5 format are located in the far corner of the exhibition. The piece completely breaks with the historical narratives of Paradise and also contrasts with our collective imagination of nature and climate. Here, man is not above nature, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über demNebelmeer (1818), and we are not wrapped up in beautiful video sequences as we know from Sir David Attenborough’s BBC series Life on Earth (1979) and The Green Planet (2022), among others. Paradise also differs from the rest of the exhibition. With it, Funch adds anew, a critical angle. It confronts us with our relationship with the world, with nature, hopes, and dreams with a distinctive expression. It is raw, minimalist, understated, and intimate. Like Thoreau, Funch scrutinises his surroundings, but the world he captures with his lens is a world forever changed. It is a world on fire.

1 Funch, Peter: The Imperfect Atlas, TBW Books & V1 Gallery, 2019. p. 7.

2 Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), edited by Stephen Fender for Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, New York, US, 1997. p. 288.

3 Thoreau, ibid, p. 354 Willis, Charles G. et.al “Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau’s woods are driven by climate change”, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), vol. 105, no. 44. 6. November 2008.

5 Larsen, Esben & Karsten Bjerring Olsen, (eds.) “Overuse is increasing“ @ The World Counts – Impact through Awareness,(last visited May 5, 2024). www.theworldcounts.com6 Albert, Simon et.al “Interactions between sea-level rise and wave exposure on reef island dynamics in the Solomon Islands”, in Environmental Research Letters, 11 054011, 2016.Colophon

This booklet is published on the occasion of the exhibition: Peter Funch: The Imperfect Atlas, June 1 – August 11, 2024Fotografisk Center, Staldgade 16, DK – 1699 København V. fotografiskcenter. Director: Signe Kahr SørensenInterim DirectorPauline Koffi Vandet. Conceived by: Signe Kahr SørensenCuratorPauline Koffi Vandet. Graphic Design: Louis Montes. Installation Team: DGI Byen. Curatorial Assistant: Katrine Christensen. Exhibition Interns: Blanka Lugosi & Lene Harbo Pedersen. Editors: Louis Montes & Pauline Koffi Vandet. Texts: Laura Ifversen & Pauline Koffi Vand

Translation and proofreading Kristoffer Kildelund PrintSøren Hørdum

Print run300© 2024 Fotografisk Center, the artist& writers

Front cover Mount Baker from Skyline Divide with clouds obscuring summit, 2014

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, Politiken-Fonden, Knud Højgaards Fond, Illux, and the New Carlsberg Foundation

Fotografisk Center is supported by the City of Copenhagen, the Danish Arts Foundation, and Augustinus Fonden