Weekend Portfolio: Jan Lehner

Images and Text by Jan Lehner

The overarching approach is the same for all of my personal projects: to use photography in a narrative and lyrical but at the same time somewhat abstract, less linear kind of way; less prosaic and restrictive than the bulk of the fashion work I make my living with.

I try to use pictures, edit and sequence to make the series speak of something that's not necessarily limited to just what’s in the photographs (in a way similar to how you would use a particular set of vocabulary and grammar to tell a story or write a poem, to how a word can signify vastly different things depending on the other words it’s surrounded by).

First and foremost every project is an attempt to use photography to describe a certain set of emotions, to externalise and manifest them, but also to understand them.

Beyond this quite intimate and personal angle what intrigues me is how each picture becomes an intricate part of the narrative of the project as a whole, even though it might not necessarily have been taken in a situation that is deeply connected to what the series speaks about. Beyond that the fact that I remember the circumstances of each picture and could tell you in great detail about the situation it was taken in but that this is not what’s actually important - so in a way it’s also a body of work that hopefully allows you to experience your own narrative even though you’re not necessarily and explicitly familiar with mine.

With all of this in mind the process is very different from my ‘normal’ approach - it’s basically a state of constantly ‘collecting’ images (with whatever i might have on hand, some are taken with a full on ‘professional’ setup, others with my phone), with ongoing phases of editing, of pushing around small work prints, trying pairings, tryptichs, then adding pictures and taking them away, changing the order, discarding everything and starting fresh, finding images from a few years ago that in a new context all of a sudden express something that they didn’t seem to say when they were taken. In the beginning it’s a slow and sometimes tedious and vague process and then all of a sudden something will crystalise itself and allow me to build on it very quickly.

Turbulence is the first of these projects that I finished, it’s the one that took the longest and that kind of determined the process. To me this is the most intimate and the rawest of the three. It deals with a time of personal upheaval after a breakup with my then partner after what I can only describe as a highly problematic relationship - followed by the revelation that we were going to have a child; shortly after I received news that my mother was very ill. I’m happy to share this in more detail with you if you’re interested but as I said above I don’t necessarily want this all to be just about my personal experience. And so it's maybe not as essential to know all of it - and still understand the emotions that are in the work (it’s sometimes hard for me to distance myself enough from it to know 100% if that’s the case).

Everything You’ve Done Before is an attempt to bring this approach to a somewhat lighter terrain. One of the things that frustrate me about fashion is the fact that most images I see (including my own) are at the very best well fabricated memories of imaginary events that never actually took place. Every half decent photographer has a bag of tricks to make people look happy, sad, pensive, you name it, but at the end all you have is very often an empty trophy in the form of a picture that only looks as if something interesting had happened. EYDB is put together from the everyday, real trips, real encounters with people, real experiences, none of which where undertaken with the intent purpose of creating images, which is why to me it feels a lot more real.

One Day At A Time is somewhat of a visual diary of the first London lockdown that started in April 2020. I was recovering from an injury that meant I hadn’t been able to walk properly for a few weeks and so even the limited radius of activity allowed under lockdown rules felt gently exciting. At the same time, Covid-19 was spreading all over the planet and no one could tell yet how long it would take until things would return to normal - or if they would at all.

Work and travel were on hold and I spent my daily walks with my two-year-old son roaming our local area, suspended in this strange spring when everything felt as if it had just stopped. To me, those images speak of that time and the strange mix of ennui and suspense, opportunity to explore and subdued sorrow about what would happen next.

More of Jan Lehner’s work can be found on his website.