It is a book about exactly that: pictures of minor staged or un-staged happenings and situations in rural surroundings are set in connection with things — “leftovers” from daily life. Some pictures are easy to decode, others not. I wanted them to challenge each other — the aim was to free them from a specific genre, to make them more open and harder to place.—Line Løkken

Pictures and Things is a photo book where images of found objects and landscapes exist together in a disjunctive relationship that transforms the everyday world from obvious, understood, into a plane that is open, without beginning or end. In Løkken’s photographs, the depicted people are friends and family in home surroundings. In this intensely familiar environment, where objects and views begin to become invisible, Løkken works to re-charge the meaning-making potential of the image.

In Pictures and Things, the space that exists between the images becomes the locus for new narrative creation. This space functions for those holding the book, prodding them to actualize their role in the viewing process — the images are a base, a launching point for their interpretation of the total work.

Pictures and Things continues Løkken’s long-standing interest in places, and how we experience and describe them through photography. The book challenges the documentary genre and our expectation and desire that photographs should be filled with content whose significance is predetermined. There is an invitation to see the everyday material world anew, to re-assess it, and to re-write its story. While this exercise begins within the pages of the book, it inevitably leads the audience to reevaluate their own surroundings.