Albert Elm presents his new photobook This Much is True with Disko Bay, following his acclaimed debut What Sort of Life is This. The new publication moves between documentary observation, cinematic atmosphere and personal reflections on contemporary life - like a visual diary of a generation caught somewhere between information overload, wanderlust and the search for orientation.
"The book weaves together Elm’s energetic snapshots and dreamlike landscapes into an original body of work that employs a raw yet playful photographic language. Through this approach, Elm reflects on life as he experiences it—at home and abroad, at this particular moment in time, shaped by his age, circumstances, and surroundings." Disko Bay Books
The images move between distant locations and everyday situations: icebergs, swimming pools and deserts meet South Asian workers in Dubai, a marble quarry in Carrara and industrial pipe systems outside Mumbai. Alongside them appear tourists photographing the Mona Lisa, graffiti on separation barriers and masked police forces in Copenhagen. From these fragments, Elm constructs a visual narrative that feels both global and deeply personal.
Like many of his generation, Elm navigates a constant overload of information, lifestyles and possibilities. The photographs emerge from an attempt to understand the many layers of reality - and to continuously push toward its edges. By refusing hierarchies between the spectacular and the ordinary, the world inside the book unfolds as one interconnected, constantly shifting landscape.
Elm’s pseudo-documentary approach functions like a highly personal archive of lived experience: he photographs what feels meaningful in the moment in order to return to it later. Almost like a stamp collector, he gathers impressions until a world slowly begins to take shape - one he can understand and ultimately feel at home in.
Albert Elm (*1990) studied at the Glasgow School of Art as well as Fatamorgana in Denmark. His work has been exhibited internationally. His first photobook What Sort of Life is This (The Ice Plant, 2017) was nominated for both the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Book Award.