When everyday life becomes surreal

Contemporary art photographer Peter Funch has produced the second exhibition chapter in the Danish pavilion, Tales of what we love. In his work, he transcends the boundaries between fantasy and reality in a visual search for unexpected tales about human beings.

At first glance the image seems normal, almost dull. People are passing by on a street. A girl is carrying her dog. A guy is walking by with a box on his right shoulder. A street image from New York like thousands seen before. But pore over the image a little longer, and something is not right. There is a pattern in the picture, everybody is carrying something, and suddenly they are tied together in a way that changes the image and tells a new poetic story. The image has been taken from Babel Tales, the largest project so far by Danish contemporary art photographer Peter Funch, who has been selected to do Tales of what we love, the second chapter of the exhibition inside the Danish Expo pavilion.

- I was always interested in taking a daily life scene and transforming it into something more surreal and abstract, says Peter Funch, who lives in New York on the border with Chinatown.

What made you say yes to join the Expo project?

- I have lived outside Denmark for eight years and haven’t really done any artistic projects in the country. I thought this was a great chance to go back to Denmark and look at it with fresh eyes and take a view of my own country which would be different from the one I would have had if I’d lived here.

Which kind of tales do you plan to tell about the Danes?

- I try to tell three tales divided into three chapters. One story is about the urban landscape of Denmark where I focus on the landscape and the city, how we unite and socialise in the city, and how we use the landscape. The second chapter is about people in public spaces, how we are as Danes, how we group, how we look and how we behave. In the third chapter, I take the story indoors and show how we work, how we are, and how we behave while we are indoors. So, in three chapters I try to tell a tale about what we love as Danes.

How did you create this chapter of the exhibition?

- I am trying to tell a relevant - I wouldn't say true - story about the Danes and Denmark in eight pictures. I am trying to get around most aspects of Denmark, the countryside, the city, how we behave inside our homes, outside, at work, etc. I don't usually rely on what is reality or fiction; I combine the two. I shoot many pictures from different places and I put them together into something that looks real but is a fictive place. It is kind of like how they did landscape paintings in the 18th century. The artist had an idea of the landscape that was not the truth but the best possible way of showing the landscape. I think the Chinese have a strong tradition for art and a very traditional way of communicating their art. They seem to be very iconic in the way they tell stories so, basically, this is what I am trying to do as well.

As a child, Peter Funch found it difficult to express himself. He mumbled and people didn't understand his words and stories. He started taking pictures with his father's camera while he was still in high school, and he realised that this was a way of communicating, a way of telling stories and making people listen to them. He graduated with a degree in photojournalism from the Danish School of Journalism in 2000 and soon after started to do his own art projects.

While doing Babel Tales, Peter Funch stayed in one spot in New York for nine, ten, sometimes fifteen days taking photos until he was able to organise the chaos that existed in the street into categories where everybody had something in common. The same technique has been used for some of the images for the Danish pavilion.

- I was shooting for two weeks in the Town Hall Square in Copenhagen making categories for Babel Tales. I also did images where one part of the image is a group of people doing the same thing. One group is yawning; another is riding their bikes, and so on. I try to put many stories into one picture so there is more than one category to each image.

Reality versus fiction is a common theme in your pictures. Why is that?

- I was always fascinated by surreal scenes, something in everyday life that looked surreal. Something that made you question why it looked like that. In Babel Tales, I took a very common event about how you look and what you do and just repeated it until it suddenly looked so strange and surreal that it made you start reflecting on your own narcissistic look and question the way you behave.

You have often used the city as the frame or setting for your photos. Where does your fascination with the city derive from?

- I always had a love for the city, for human beings, our interactions and how we socialise. The cities are where people are packed densely, and that is where most of our stories are. So the city easily becomes the most interesting frame for the story about people. The cities are so fascinating.

What is your motivation to do art?

- I am curious about people. One thing I admire about photography is that photographers have always been able to produce large-scale documents about human beings that you can take out 50 or 100 years later and be surprised by the way people looked back then. I would like to see my Babel Tales in that way. I hope people will look at them in 20 years or so and think – wauw - it is really interesting how these people look.

How do you think the Chinese will relate to your images?

- It is a good question. Maybe they will think my images look a lot like the Little Mermaid, perhaps like a little fairytale. They may think about Denmark and wonder about this little country and how people live in such an idyllic little county. Why is everything so homogenous?