Facade, Fiction, & Imagination with Alma Egeskov

Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are? 

My name is Alma Egeskov, I’m 24 and come from Copenhagen, Denmark but currently based in Brooklyn, New York. I primarily work digitally, I like the fluidity of the digital format. I often shoot with a medium format (Hasselblad H3D) or (Fujifilm X-H1). 

Photographically I’m currently exploring a story my mother wrote about me, titled The Day You Disappeared. It’s inspired by a summer when I was seventeen, that my family and I spent in our summerhouse by the coast of Denmark. The story is written from my mother’s perspective about viewing me slowly turning into a fish or a mermaid and disappearing into the ocean. It’s a story about loss and the fear of losing, identity and change. 

I’m also working on a solo show for this spring in Copenhagen, which primarily will be inspired by the story The Day You Disappeared. It will be an image response to the text but also my interpretation of the story and my identity from my own perspective as well as my mother’s. 

What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you? 

My sisters have always interested me and female dynamics in general, especially the relationship that has developed between my sisters and I from growing up in a difficult and complicated home. I see myself a lot in my sisters, sometimes they become me, or I become them. I see them in my experiences and where I go, and I sense that they see me. 

I also have a weird fascination with facades, both as a physical object and emotionally. The area where I grew up, has these big houses out by the ocean, they’re beautiful, have big gates and fences, and we just see what’s visible from the outside. They make me wonder about the things we keep hidden and the things we don’t say to keep up appearances. I like to make up narratives about the lives they live inside. 

When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?

My father introduced me to photography when I was a teenager, it was the first time I became aware of the fact that I could use it as an artistic medium. Both my parents worked with art when I was growing up, my mother a painter and my father an art dealer, so I was always aware of expression and art as a language. I wasn’t very good at painting, writing or other creative forms so it felt invigorating to find my medium. It also gave me relief, I’ve always had many thoughts and feelings that I can’t express through words and being able to express something visually feels very powerful to me. 

Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects? 

I've spent the past year working on Interference, a series that explores complexities of female identity, how external pressures and the gaze of others interfere with internal desires and doubts. The majority of the portraits are of my four sisters. I’ve used their image to reflect a female perspective shaped by my own experiences. 

Contrast is an important element in Interference and something that continues to follow me in my work, the idea of something breaking and stirring beneath the surface. Moving from the exterior to the interior, the visual narrative in the series unfolds from two distinct points of view: an outsider’s gaze, observing from a distance, and an internal perspective. Though the women are watched, they do not conform to the traditional notion of being objects of the gaze; instead, they exist in a space of introspection, where the distinction between observer and observed becomes fluid.

Regardless of individual projects I believe my work melts together and has a common ground, they exist in the same universe. I’ve put Interference aside for now and I’m working on new things, like portraying the story my mother wrote about me, but the images still follows me and shape the new work I make. 

How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others? 

My visual literacy is something I’ve discovered over time and continue to develop. My photographic language is deeply influenced by cinema, the way images are framed, cut together, and based on continuity. Cinema changed the way I think about photography. I no longer see a still image as static but as something with a moving presence.

I am often drawn to images that feel slightly odd, that disrupt expectations of what a photograph is supposed to be. I like to be left with a feeling of uncertainty, where I haven’t fully figured it out, but something lingers, an image that continues beyond its frame.

Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?

I would tell them to embrace their curiosity and trust their instincts. Don’t worry about perfection, let go of the idea of a good image. Let yourself be drawn to what feels right, even if it doesn’t make immediate sense. The images that stay with you often hold something unresolved.