Line Løkken’s Skygger i Vann / Shadows in Water: Looking for Daphnia galeata and Diamond Eyelet Mesh is a newspaper edition photo book dealing with one of the dire global challenges of our time: water as a public resource. Løkken began photographing the innermost glaciers in Norway at Jotunheimen National Park, before proceeding downriver — via underwater camera — to the largest lake in the country, Lake Mjøsa. The resulting newspaper offers an expanded view into the many contested lives of a precious element.
The backdrop for Løkken’s pictorial approach is contemporary reality: pollution, flooding, and drought. Changes in the water cycle as a result of climate change. Privatization, issues of access to clean water. New pollutants: siloxanes and micro-plastics. The overconsumption of phosphorus in food production (the source of the depicted green algae in Lake Mjøsa). Water, as a commodity, increasingly governed by capitalist forces and political power struggles.
In Løkken’s approach, the element of water is depicted through several phases in its lifecycle. The glaciers are the starting point, but as we move downstream we find landscapes sculpted by forces from the Earth and of mankind. At Lake Mjøsa, images were made during water sampling, and along the inlets. These varied methods connect micro- and macro-perspectives, rendering complex hydrology in a comprehensible form.
With this research in hand, the viewer is left to ask: What does water mean to us today? What is our relationship to this vital chemical compound? Amidst rampant man-caused ecocide, what rights should a watershed have?
