snapshot: quick questions with ck/ck

When I first saw ck/ck’s photograph of the picnic table at White Sands, I was stunned.  Stunned by the blue sky, the stark landscape.  The lonely picnic table and hopeful hibachi.  I’ve since been stunned by many of his images, each capturing something unique to a place, something uniquely American, in its way.  Something I think can be more easily captured if you’re from someplace else.

White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. (Or the moon?) by ck/ck

Greg: So first, what’s your name, and what are some places you’ve lived?
Claes: My name is Claes, and I’m from Sweden. I grew up in a town called Sundsvall (pop. 90,000), and lived there most of my life so far before moving to Karlskrona, which is at the very south of Sweden. There I attended school, which sent me on an internship to New York City last summer through this spring, where I lived for nine months until this road trip started at the end of April. Currently I’m living out of a suitcase and a car.

G: How did you get involved in photography?
C: I only got into photography in December  2006 when I had to replace a broken digital camera (a tiny, fully automatic Sony), and for reasons I really don’t know or remember, I made a conscious decision to buy a compact camera that offered more than auto modes. I got a Canon Powershot A710 IS that had manual modes, quite a zoom, macro, etc. Flash forward four months, I was completely in love with photography. Like truly and madly. I had used this compact camera to do every type of photography imaginable, and I felt I was ready for a DSLR. So I went from not interested at all to obsessed within just a few months. The rest is history.

G: What made you wish to travel across America and photograph it?
C: I’ve always wanted to go on a road trip across America for as long as I can remember. I think the seed of going on a road trip comes from traveling across Europe with my family and our caravan as a kid; that travel-by-car bug got me early. It really is the only way to really see the world. Fast forward to the present, I’m living in New York and I have my final project for my school coming up post-internship, and it just seemed like the perfect timing (and maybe the last chance), not only to go on the road trip that I always wanted to go on, but do it with my camera in hand and be able to do it as a school project. So it’s been a trip that has fulfilled many things.

G: I think it’s interesting you traveled when you were young.  I don’t think people normally associate the road trip with Europe. I think of it as something very American.
C: Europeans travel a lot within the continent, but maybe not always as a road trip where you keep moving throughout the whole journey. The road trips I was on when I were young was basically a week of driving down to Italy, where we would stay put for a month, then a week’s drive back.

G: In your photographs on this trip, you have taken such perfect shots of America.  One of my favorites is the picnic table at White Sands. How does being from another culture affect your ability to capture a place?  How do you see things and capture things in America that you might not elsewhere? Do you think you would be able to make the same kinds of photographs of Sweden?  I ask because I’m becoming more interested in photography and place.
C: Actually, I feel that I hadn’t found my photographic “voice” until I moved to New York City, so I actually have no idea how I’ll fare back in Sweden. I think I’ll do just fine, I think the things that interest me as a photographer can be found in any country or culture, but I do also agree that coming from a different background helps you look at things a little differently than someone who grew up there would. It’s just looking at things with a fresh pair of eyes. If you’ve been looking at it all your life, you stopped really looking a long time ago.

For example, when I think of Sweden, while it’s beautiful and is a very good country to live in, to me it’s sort of bland and familiar, whereas someone from another country might see the same things and be amazed. It wasn’t until I got really interested in photography that I actually walked around my hometown and really looked at what’s there. It was quite a revelation.

Astoria, Oregon. by ck/ck